Entries by Jean Rhodes

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.

Three Essential Lessons From Our Social Capital Research

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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 […]

Tell Me More: What Research on Listening and Curiosity Tells Mentors

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By Jean Rhodes An interesting study published late last year asks what actually happens, moment to moment and behavior by behavior, when two people are connecting (West et al., 2025). Drawing on two large archival datasets from prior social connection studies involving 646 adult participants, West and colleagues coded observable listening behaviors during stranger conversations, […]

The Case for Credible Messengers

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Jean Rhodes Credible messenger mentoring is a community-rooted approach in which adults who have lived through incarceration, gang involvement, community violence, or related experiences are recruited, trained, and paid to mentor young people walking similar paths. The idea traces to 1979, when a group of incarcerated men led by Eddie Ellis imagined a movement of […]

How Real Conversations Can Change LIves

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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 […]

Beyond the Chatbot: How AI Can Upskill Mentors and Deepen Human Connection

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By Jean Rhodes A new Hamilton Project paper by Daron Acemoglu, David Autor, and Simon Johnson, Building Pro-Worker Artificial Intelligence, makes an argument that has direct implications for the field of mentoring. The authors distinguish between technologies that commodify human expertise and technologies that expand it. The first kind automates what workers know and shrinks […]

When Students (Not Chatbots) Help Students, Everyone Flourishes

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By Jean Rhodes In 2020, Tyler VanderWeele and his team at Harvard’s Human Flourishing Program tracked nearly 13,000 adults to explore the longitudinal effects of altruism. Their findings, published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, were striking. People who volunteered at least two hours a week reported significantly higher levels of happiness and life […]