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.

By Jean Rhodes In 2022, researcher Raj Chetty and his team published a landmark analysis of 21 billion social connections found that “economic connectedness,” (defined as the share of higher-income friends in a low-income person’s social network), is among the strongest predictors of upward mobility ever identified. If low-income children grew up in communities with […]

By Jean Rhodes A rigorous new study, published in the Journal of Research on Adolescence, has implications for the field of mentoring. In it, psychologist Marc Bornstein and colleagues followed 1,338 adolescents across nine countries, from China to Colombia to Kenya to the United States, tracking their levels of positive youth development (PYD) from age […]

By Jean Rhodes A new study Lauren Schudde, published in The Review of Higher Education, used nationally representative longitudinal data and propensity score models to examine the effects of early engagement at community colleges. Speaking with faculty about academic matters outside of class increased the probability that students would return for a second year by […]