By Timothy Churchill,Staff Writer

OXFORD – Federal grant money is allowing a local faith-based youth organization to help teens and young adults who struggle to find and keep jobs.

The $44,000 grant funds a mentoring program at His Place Teen Center that teaches 16- to 24-year-olds in the region how to locate and maintain employment.

Last week, officials from the U.S. Department of Labor and other organizations toured His Place to see how the program at the youth center is doing.

His Place on Webber Brook Road features “teen church,” a Bible study session, every Friday night. Bert Rugg, the center’s executive director, said His Place is nondenominational. The “His” refers to God.

His Place was approved to begin the program last September by Maine Mentoring Partnership in Augusta, said Rugg on Friday. The grant itself was awarded to the mentoring partnership by the Department of Labor’s Office of Disability Employment Policy. If all goes well, Rugg said, funding for the program will be available to His Place until 2010.

Rugg said that the notion that self-assuredness and finding a good job are tightly intertwined is at the very core of the program.

“We teach the kids in regards to career aspirations,” Rugg said. “We’re working to help their self-esteem as much as possible, so they have the skills to find good jobs.”

His Place was one of six organizations in the entire country to receive the Office of Disability Employment Policy funding, Rugg said, and the only one that is faith-based.

Last Tuesday, Rugg said, representatives from the Department of Labor and the five other organizations that received Disability Employment Policy money across the country visited His Place for a tour and presentation.

“They came here because we’re faith-based and the others aren’t,” Rugg said. “We got a chance to show them what (His Place) is all about, how we started.”

His Place works in collaboration with Big Brother/Big Sister, a program of the Child Health Center in Norway, to execute the grant agreement. Big Brother/Big Sister thoroughly screens all applicants and matches up mentors with mentees, Rugg said, describing the mentors as “people from the community, businesspeople, church leaders, community leaders.”

Rugg said that so far Big Brother/Big Sister has matched 25 mentees with mentors in the entire tri-county area.

Six boys enrolled in the program have met with their mentors at His Place every Thursday night at 5 p.m. since February, Rugg said. Between 5 and 7 p.m. everyone plays Ping-Pong, works on the computers and eats dinner. For the next hour and a half, Rugg said, mentors and mentees get down to brass tacks.

“There’s discussion and we read chapters from a book called 7 Habits of Highly Effective Teens,'” by Sean Covey.

Rugg said that, among other uses, the grant money has helped purchase books, upgrade computers and enable the youths to attend lectures by motivational speakers.

Because the money is federal, Rugg said, one of the guidelines is that His Place is forbidden to proselytize. But, he said, the program’s mentees who are also regulars at His Place’s weekly Bible study gatherings “asked for Christians to be their mentors.”

Rugg feels the mentoring program is a near-perfect match for the overall mission of His Place.

“It fits right in to what we’re doing here,” he said. “We not only want to impact them, we want to make them productive additions to society.”

Still, Rugg said he feels the program’s age guidelines could stand some tweaking.

He said that mentors have learned “we need to be looking at the younger kids to get them ready for society and the workplace. If we could change the grant, we’d change it to 14 or 15.”

But, he added, “Things move slow in Washington, so that’s not going to happen soon.”