Mr. Clinkscales serves as the Executive Director of MI Peer Mentoring in Grand Rapids, MI. Our vision is to enhance the ability of persons experiencing a life transition to achieve long term success. We accomplish this by pairing the individual with a Peer Mentor who has successfully transitioned from a shared experience. Peer Mentors provide encouragement, resources, and support opportunities to Mentees as they reach their goals. The goal of MI Peer Mentoring is to prevent recidivism by providing mentoring, cognitive behavioral intervention, workforce development, recovery support opportunities, and basic life skills to ex-offenders reentering the community. Through MIPM programs (or curricula), offenders learn new skills and new ways of thinking that can lead to changes in their behavior and actions, and ultimately affect their criminal conduct. MIPM programs use a combination of approaches to increase an offender’s awareness of self and others. Examples of this is through open forum discussions, group activities, and one on one counseling with a certified counselor.Gaining this awareness is coupled with the teaching of social skills to assist the offender with intrapersonal and interpersonal problems. In other words, these specific types of intervention programs assist an offender in restructuring the thought process and teach cognitive skills to assist in basic decision-making and problem solving.The premise of MI Peer Mentoring programs is to teach offenders how to change their antisocial beliefs to prosocial ones with the change process focusing on the content of their thinking. Programs designed for cognitive restructuring guides offenders through a process of consciously examining their thoughts, and then making connections between their thoughts, related emotions and the crimes they commit. Supported by committed mentorship and given a sense of value the individual is equipped to make better decisions and less likely to reoffend.