Lisa Gill, director of serving at First United Methodist Church, 200 E. North St., is looking for a few good mentors.

She's hoping to recruit and train people from the community to begin mentoring individuals both during and after their jail terms to help the former inmates successfully transition into the community.

Gill said, “I was asked by Jeff Bailey, Butler County Prison's re-entry coordinator, to chair the faith-based/mentoring/peer support subcommittee of the Reentry Coalition.”

The coalition, said Gill, was recently created though a grant from the Pennsylvania Commission on Crime and Deliquency.

“We have a handful of community churches and organizations who are working together to achieve this goal,” said Gill, adding member groups of the mentor subcommittee include the Catholic and Lutheran churches of Butler, North Main Street Church of God and the Grace Youth and Family Foundation and Grapevine organizations.

“Jeff Bailey asked me to chair because of our church's partnership with the prison for the last five years,” said Gill.

First United runs three prison ministries at the county prison, she said.

Baily said, “We have mentoring services for re-entry into the community, but it's for a very small core of inmates: people court-ordered into the program.”

“The coalition is geared to assisting all inmates,” Bailey said. “Our goal is to target every inmate in the jail.” This would be a tall order as the most recent count of the inmate population was 330, said Bailey.

Still, Gill said, the subcommittee could begin small.

“I would love to see about 20 mentors to start out with,” Gill said. “Right now, we have two or three people we can call if someone wants to meet. They have no formal training and are ill-equipped to be named as an actual mentor.”

Training hasn't been ironed out yet, said Gill. “I feel like we are very much building this airplane as we are flying it,” she said. But she added the subcommittee is exploring a number of different programs.

Gill said the mentoring subcommittee is planning an information session at North Main Street Church of God April 12.

“We're looking for people with a relationship with Christ,” said Gill. “This is a faith-based community group.”

“One of the things I keep coming back to is the struggles with addiction. Jesus can do for them what they can't do for themselves,” Gill said.

However, this is not a 12-step program, she stressed.

“But we want to develop a relationship with people,” Gill said. “This is mentoring with no agenda.”

Once mentors are trained, Gill said, ideally by July, they would meet with inmates before they are released.

Bailey said mentors and ex-inmates could meet anywhere in the community.

“These would be low-impact individuals,” said Bailey. “Someone who would be a potential danger would be screened. We wouldn't put anyone in harm's way. A lot are actually good people.”

“We want to start out with people while they are still in prison. Stats indicate that works better if they have time to develop that relationship before they are released,” said Gill.

The mentors would meet with the former inmates at least once a month after they are released.

“They will meet weekly with them in jail, and carry on for at least a year, “ said Gill. “They will be a support system, if they need to look for a job or just need someone to talk to.”

Mentoring sessions could be about anything, said Bailey.

Mentors, he said, will “serve as a support. Just to have someone to lean on. A lot of these people have no family members or pretty much of anything.”