Mercer Street Friends
151 Mercer Street
Trenton , NJ 08611

Telephone: (609) 396-1506
Fax: (609) 392-8363
Contact: Janina Akins, Director of Communications
E-mail: jakins@mercerstreetfriends.org
Website: www.mercerstreetfriends.org

Mercer Street Friends is a Quaker-affiliated, nonsectarian human care organization working to provide compassionate and practical solutions to the problems of poverty. Inspired by the Quaker spirit and recognizing the inherent worth of all people, Mercer Street Friends is dedicated to the creation of a nurturing environment in which individuals may achieve independence, community, and quality of life.

Values
Mercer Street Friends promotes the values of tolerance, equality of all people, social justice and nonviolent resolution of conflict. It is dedicated to meeting community needs by providing a range of social services that nurture self-worth, independence, community, and quality of life for children, young people, adults, the elderly, and the disabled.

Programs
The organization has a wide range of programs and services to help people overcome the debilitating effects of poverty, hunger, neglect, and health concerns. There are four divisions of Mercer Street Friends.

Each and every week of the year, the Mercer Street Friends Food Bank distributes 40,000 pounds of food to 50 area agencies and food pantries that provide nourishment to children, adults and seniors at risk for hunger. In a year, more than two million pounds of food from the Food Bank reaches 18,000 people in one of the wealthiest counties in the state.

Through the Children and Youth Services Division of Mercer Street Friends, the Back on Track program provides delinquency prevention for children ages 8 through 17 and the Urban Gateway Programprovides life skills and job skills training as well as employment to young people ages 14 through 21.

Throughout the school year, children arrive at Mercer Street Friends School-Age Child Care programs held in nine public schools in Hamilton Township.  Mercer Street Friends also provides the only after school program in Mercer County for children with special needs who are unable to attend regular public school programs.  There are also twoMercer Street Friends Early Childhood Development Centers, where infants, toddlers, and pre-schoolers receive full-day care.

Mercer Street Friends clinical services provide substance abuse and mental health counseling services to youth and families in various locations.

The Mercer Street Friends Parenting and Adult Services Division provides family support service programs that build competency in adults through parenting training, education, and employment support to foster individual, family and community health. Parenting programs provide assessment, home visiting and nurturing parenting education. Programs prepare clients with life skills for the world of work, and the Adult Basic Skills program provides instruction at all literacy levels -- in reading and math as well as GED preparation.

Mercer Street Friends is the lead agency for the collaboration operating the Children's Futures "Healthy Start" program. The Family Support and Reunification Program serves families who have been affected by drug or alcohol abuse and provides a resource to help either reduce the amount of time children spend in temporary placement or avoid placement altogether. 

Mercer Street Friends is a nonprofit human services agency that serves residents of Mercer County, New Jersey. Mercer Street Friends provides services designed to promote dignity and self-sufficiency for families and individuals. With more than 16 locations in the Trenton area, more than 200 full- and part-time employees, and more than 500 dedicated volunteers, Mercer Street Friends has developed programs for infants, toddlers, children, adolescents, adults, seniors and the disabled.

Research Questions

• The Mercer Street Friends Parenting Program focuses on reducing the cases of child abuse and neglect and increasing healthy attachment for families who are prenatal to the child's age of three.  Mercer Street Friends is interested in research on the true cost savings of this program.  The project should focus on trends in the general community and compare that to the program's effectiveness in combating incidences of pre-mature births, emergency room visits, asthmatic attacks and cost/frequency of undiagnosed developmental delays.

• Mercer Street Friends would like students to research innovative school-based approaches to the treatment of childhood obesity, preferably for pre-school and school aged children.

• The organization would like to be better-equipped to address the problems of youth violence and involvement in gangs. What does the research literature indicate about the risk factors and most effective empirically-based intervention strategies and programs for gang involvement? What resources (i.e. funding, staffing, community and governmental collaborations, etc) are necessary in order to implement these interventions? How effective is treating the entire family as compared to treating only the individual involved in the gang?

• The Children and Youth Services Division of MSF could benefit from assistance with managing and analyzing outcome data for our various programs.

• Mercer Street Friends is interested in having a student conduct a study to determine how it is doing in terms of their internal processes. How can its internal structures be organized to be more cost-efficient?

• MSF has two daycare centers that are a real source of stability for the children, especially those of the working poor. One center has Abbott classrooms and the other has non-Abbott classes. Abbott classes pay for certified teachers and aides while non-Abbott classes may not necessarily have them. Mercer Street Friends is open to any research on the Abbott vs. non-Abbott classroom. 

• The Home Health Care Division has begun an Acute Care Hospitalization risk assessment on all admitted patients and those with a certain score will be put on a protocol of in-home visits combined with telephony (phone call monitoring) to provide intense patient-clinician contact during the first two weeks after hospitalization. It would be very important to learn if this intervention truly has a positive effect on the outcome of Acute Care Hospitalization and re-hospitalization.

• Mercer Street Friends is open to considering any sort of research project. It has a wide range of programs that students may look at and is open to any suggestions from students in any area of research. It is also interested in students collecting data on any of their programs. It would be helpful to see how effective their programs have been and whether there is a need for improvements.

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