Entries by Jean Rhodes

Why Mentoring Professionals Love Their Work But May Leave Anyway

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By Jean Rhodes MENTOR’s newly released Movement Makers report offers a rare glimpse into the perspectives of the mentoring program workforce.  Although decades of research have examined mentoring relationship quality, program practices, and youth outcomes, surprisingly little attention has been paid to the professionals who design, implement, and sustain these programs. This gap is particularly […]

Why “Someone like me” Matters in Mentor Matching

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By Jean Rhodes How important is it for mentors and mentees to be matched on the basis of shared gender, race, major, background, or lived experience? My team and I examined this question in a university-wide peer mentoring program serving 2,072 first-year college students. Students were matched only by major, which created a rare opportunity […]

Wisdom from Professor Carola Suárez-Orozco

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Editor’s Note: A version of this appeared a few years ago but the topic seems particularly relevant these days. With this in mind, here’s a shortened version Hope it’s helpful! by Jean Rhodes Carola Suárez-Orozco, Senior Fellow at Boston College’s Lynch School of Education and Human Development and the Director of the Immigrant Flourishing and […]

What the Odyssey Gets Right About Mentoring

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By Jean Rhodes Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey opens this week in theaters, and audiences will watch Zendaya play Athena, the shape-shifting goddess who guides young Telemachus while his father, Odysseus, is lost at sea. Athena appears to Telemachus, played by Tom Holland, in the form of Mentor. She accompanies him, encourages him, and helps him […]

Research shows lifelong influence of mentors: But there’s a catch

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 by Jean E. Rhodes It almost goes without saying that natural mentors can be enormously influential– from early childhood through adolescence and early adulthood. But, because such relationships can not be randomly assigned, it is actually a bit difficult to untangle their causes from their effects. Some pepole are “mentor magnets” and some communities are teeming […]

Implementing a professional youth mentoring program during times of crisis: Lessons from the global pandemic.

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Hanson, K. G., Satchell, A. K., Skinner, M. L., & Eddy, J. M. (2026). Implementing a professional youth mentoring program during times of crisis: Lessons from the global pandemic. International Journal of Adolescence and Youth, 31(1), Article 2685864. https://doi.org/10.1080/02673843.2026.2685864 This study uses Friends of the Children (FOTC) to examine what happens when a highly structured, […]

Become a State Certified Therapeutic Mentor!

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The University of Massachusetts Boston is launching a new Community Health Worker Training with specialization in Therapeutic Mentoring program that may be of interest to mentoring practitioners, youth workers, and program leaders who are grappling with increasingly complex health and mental health needs among the young people and families they serve. Although housed at UMass […]

Mentoring, Task Shifting, and the Paraprofessional Revolution

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mentors trained as paraprofessionals could be pivotal in providing accessible mental health support for young people, reducing barriers, and helping mentees engage with professional services more readily. By equipping mentors with structured training and aligning them with best practices, youth mentoring programs could meet an urgent need for accessible, scalable mental health interventions.

More Than Hallucinations: Five Developmental Processes at Stake in the Age of AI

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By Jean Rhodes Much of the public debate about artificial intelligence in higher education has focused on accuracy. Chatbots hallucinate. They generate plausible-sounding but factually incorrect answers about financial aid deadlines, course requirements, and mental health resources. They encode biases drawn from the data on which they were trained and can produce inconsistent responses to […]