The Southwest Colorado Opioid Regional Council (SWCORC) recently announced $1.5 million in community grants, which will be used to support local-level programs focused on mitigating opioid abuse.
These grants represent the first step in the distribution of $880 million in settlement funds that the State of Colorado will receive over the next 18 years. The settlements are the result of a series of lawsuits against companies involved in the production and distribution of prescription opioids.
In its initial 2025-26 grant cycle, the council gave out ten awards to support programs in the areas of prevention and education, treatment, harm reduction, recovery and law enforcement. Local non-profit Gunnison Valley Mentors is one of the recipients.
Mentors was awarded $100,000 under the prevention and education category, which it will use to fund a new group mentoring program, called Rite of Passage. The program, which is already under way, serves at-risk youth, with a focus on behavioral change and personal growth.
Mentors Executive Director Tina McGuinness said the organization had been looking ahead at national trends, and saw that especially in urban areas there was a lot of group mentoring. Group mentoring focuses on serving a peer group of mentees together, based on concepts such as identity, belonging and agency.
Around the same time, Malcolm Boyce, one the organization’s PLUS mentors, had been matched with a new mentee.
“This mentee in particular fell through the cracks,” Boyce said, because he had become involved with the legal system, and was on probation. “He and I made some agreements and some behavioral contracts, and he just did phenomenal.”
Then, through Mentors, the opportunity arose for Boyce and his mentee to attend a national mentorship conference in Washington, DC. The conference included groups from places like Buffalo, DC and Philadelphia.
The conference included a separate youth program, which the mentee attended, and it had a profound impact on him, Boyce said.
“When he got back from DC, he wanted to mentor a kid. He said, ‘I want to give back. We’re not bad kids. We don’t need to be fixed. We just need skills and tools.’”
The experience convinced Boyce that the time was right to create a group mentoring program in Gunnison, and McGuinness agreed.
“I went to Tina about it, and she saw an opportunity with SWCORC and started grant writing,” Boyce said.
The initial group mentoring program is targeted at boys in the 7th and 8th grades.
“We’re providing a safe space to talk about what it’s like being a young boy coming up,” Boyce said, which ties back to the program’s name — Rite of Passage. Even though Rite of Passage is a group program, each boy is still matched with their own individual mentor.
“We looked particularly for mentors with lived experience, and we were able to recruit some really high quality mentors,” Boyce said.
The group has been meeting weekly for several months now.
“Early on, we tied it to values,” Boyce said. “We saw a disconnect between the boys’ values and their actions.”
In the initial sessions, the boys came together with their individual values, and from there came up with a set of shared values, which they called their code of honor, Boyce said.
“Everything we do is to enhance these values that they’ve selected for themselves.”
An important aspect of the program is that it includes a clinical support component, McGuinness said. Many of the regular weekly meetings are facilitated by a behavioral health clinician. Sessions cover cognitive therapy, which focuses on changing negative thought patterns and behaviors and dialectical therapy, which addresses emotional regulation and how to deal with intense emotions.
These meetings typically start out with everyone together in a group discussion, which is then followed by time devoted to one-on-one mentorship. One benefit of the group work, McGuinness said, is that it allows the mentors to develop better skills to work with the boys individually.
Another key difference with the Rite of Passage program is that most of the mentees come from home environments where there are co-occurring mental health and substance abuse disorders, McGuinness said.
Most of them are past the experimental phase with drugs, and into usage patterns that can lead to addiction, McGuinness said. “If we can disrupt that pattern of usage, we know we can prevent addiction into the future.”
That’s what makes the program a strong fit with SWCORC’s goal of prevention and education. Overall, the idea is to be more intentional in terms of personal development, and to address the underlying reasons for behavioral issues.
As the boys mature and grow through the program, the goal is for them to become mentors themselves.
“These kids become credible messengers for the next peer group,” Boyce said. Once they become freshmen, the idea is to match them up with elementary school students, and put them in a position of leadership.
“I want to help out other kids,” one of the boys said. “Just because we do bad things doesn’t make us bad.”
(William Spicer is a Gunnison-based freelance writer.)
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