Mid Valley Mentors is a community-based nonprofit agency located in Salem that provides mentoring and support services for at-risk youth and adults in Marion and Polk Counties.

Mid Valley Mentors began as the Juvenile Enrichment through Mentoring (JEM) program and has grown and morphed over the years into the agency it is today.  The Marion County Children established JEM and Families Commission in 2004 as the result of a community assessment conducted in 2002 which identified a gap in services to support youth offenders in their transition from incarceration back into the Marion County community.  Following the assessment a planning session involving over 400 individuals representing government, education, juvenile justice, law enforcement, business, social services, and civic leaders identified mentoring as a strategy to address the identified need.

In 2004, the Children and Families Commission was awarded a grant for an AmeriCorps VISTA to design and implement an evidence-based mentor program to serve a pilot of 15 youth offenders.  Within the first six months of operation, the program formed a consortium to apply for and was subsequently awarded nearly a half million dollar federal grant from the Department of Education Office of Safe and Drug-free Schools to expand the program over three years to serve at-risk middle school youth.  Because of those funds, the program founder, who is currently Mid Valley Mentors’ Executive Director, attended several national mentor program trainings and benefited from onsite consultation and technical assistance resulting in the establishment of a community-based 501(c)(3) nonprofit agency, Youth Impact, to provide sustainability for implementation of the JEM program.

In 2009, a partnership was created with the Marion County Reentry Initiative to serve  adult inmates releasing to Marion County and established the Reentry Solutions Program (RSP) to offer ex-offenders one-to-one mentoring relationships to support them in successful transition from prison into the community.  In early 2010 Youth Impact began re-branding the agency as Mid Valley Mentors to clarify the agency mission, improve community visibility and increase volunteer recruitment.