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FORUM: Mentoring relationships as a context for service delivery: What do you think? - Chronicle of Evidence-Based Mentoring

Mentoring relationships as a context for service delivery: What do you think?

by Michael Garringer Psychotherapy researchers have long argued about how direct and goal-oriented the therapist should be.  There are some who believe that, if a strong relationship is forged between the therapist and client, a “corrective experience” leading to a cascade of good outcomes will eventually emerge. Others believe that the practice of therapy works […]

FORUM: What is your most effective mentor recruitment message?

Mentoring programs are becoming increasingly sophisticated in how they recruit mentors and the messages they use to get volunteers to take the plunge and formally apply to be a mentor. Large national organizations might hire leading advertising firms to carefully craft their recruitment messages, but even the smallest local programs can come up with a […]

New posts in the iTunes “Mentoring U” podcast series

We are thrilled to announce the new Mentoring U audio podcast series. Now you can download episodes and learn about mentoring while you’re driving, cooking, etc.  Produced by award-winning radio host, Micheline Mann, the Chronicle’s podcast series was recently described by one listener as “like NPR for mentoring.” To get started, we have released 10 new podcasts for […]

FORUM: Does mentoring work in rural areas?

by Mike Garringer In my time as a technical assistance provider in the youth mentoring field, some of the most difficult and persistent challenges I’ve seen are those faced by rural mentoring programs. While running a high-quality program is difficult in any town or urban environment, the challenges faced by rural programs are considerable: geographic […]

FORUM: When (and how) should mentoring programs disclose mentors’ personal information?

A colleague of mine recently shared an inquiry they had received from a local program that was thinking through an issue that had bubbled up: Should they tell mentees (or mentees’ parents) that a mentor is gay? And if so, why and when? This was a school-based program serving primarily younger elementary-age students and to […]

FORUM: Should mentors be compensated for their time?

Do you think that mentors should be compensated for the time they put into working with youth?  Although more intensive programs are associated with better youth outcomes, programs must balance the potential benefits of more intensive relationships with potentially greater difficulty recruiting and retaining volunteer mentors. Some programs have addressed this tension by offering incentives […]

FORUM: How is your mentoring program collaborating in the community?

One of the more interesting, and potentially impactful, trends in the social sector over the last few years has been the rise of “collective impact” efforts in hundreds of communities across the United States. While mentoring programs and others who work with youth and families to build resiliency and promote lifelong success have always collaborated […]

FORUM: Should mentors and mentees be “friends” on social media?

It goes without saying that social media has dramatically changed the way people interact and share their lives with others over the past decade. We now have the ability to broadcast information about ourselves to audiences at a scale that once would have seemed unimaginable. We also have the ability to carefully curate a “public” […]

POLL: Does your program have a fully-developed theory of change?

Recently I’ve been thinking about a “disconnect” that I often see in the mentoring field: the difference between what programs say they can achieve through mentoring and what they actually do in practice. Now, most mentoring programs can obviously give a reasonable description of the goals of their program and some explanation of what mentors […]

FORUM: How do you encourage mentors to support students academically?

For the longest time, policymakers, school districts, and educators have been trying to figure out how to use the power of mentoring to support students academically. Early on, this led to mentoring programs that were “mentoring” in name, but heavy on tutoring or other direct academic support in terms of the actual activities volunteers and […]