About the Presenters  

Dustianne North has been working in the field of youth prevention and mentoring since 1995, when she began building a mentor and volunteer program for the youth in foster care at the Florence Crittenton Center in Los Angeles. After creating the first mentor program to receive official approval from LA County agencies who govern foster care, Ms. North began providing training and technical assistance through CARS/EMT Associates for all types of prevention programs nationwide. Additionally, she has significant experience in the design and development of large-scale collaborative efforts to provide services for youth in foster care and on probation in Los Angeles County and other counties in California. She specializes in assisting programs that serve youth in distressed situations such as court-involved youth. Ms.North has now completed her M.S.W. at UCLA, and she continues to work toward her Ph.D. in Social Welfare, also at UCLA. As a trainer and consultant, she draws upon her experiences in prevention and mentoring, her clinical training as a social worker, her administrative expertise in designing curricula, her arts and culture background, and her experience as a trainer. This diverse scope of knowledge allows her to work with direct practice issues such as communicating with youth, as well as macro-level issues, program design, and interagency partnerships.

Jerry Sherk is a nationally recognized consultant for both youth and adult mentoring programs. Jerry has a master’s degree in counseling psychology, and he is President and founder of Mentor Management Systems, of Encinitas, California. Over the past ten years, Jerry has provided workshops for hundreds of program staff, mentors and mentees, while helping over 200 mentoring programs to develop their operating systems. This experience has enabled Jerry to constantly improve methods for helping mentoring agencies

come to scale more quickly and efficiently. Jerry is currently providing technical assistance for programs that serve gang-involved youth, foster youth, Department of Education grantees, Early Care and Education

student-teachers, and adult ex-offenders. From 1970-1981, Jerry was an All Pro defensive lineman for the Cleveland Browns. For his service to his team, Jerry was recently honored as a "Cleveland Browns Legend."