Content for Mentors

All content relevant for adult mentors who are looking to better serve their mentees.

Laughter can encourage self-disclosure and closeness with mentees

by Jeremy Dean Laughter encourages people to open up and this is the secret to how to make friends, a new study finds. People in the study were more likely to disclose something personal about themselves after laughing together, although they didn’t realise it. Self-disclosure is usually critical to how to make friends, as the study’s […]

The Pocket Mentor: Insider Tips from America’s Most Successful People

Editor’s Note: In this column, we will be continuing our series of offering bits of advice from 101 of our country’s most successful men and women. The advice was compiled by writer Vince Reardon into a book, The Pocket Mentor: Insider Tips from America’s Most Successful People which is now available for purchase on Amazon. After gathering all the […]

You should sometimes talk politics and religion: Here’s why

by Jean Rhodes I was presenting findings from my research on Hurricane Katrina to a group of college students when something very interesting happened. Many of the students were first generation Haitian immigrants, others the privileged sons and daughters of Boston’s elite. Still other were first generation college students from Southie and Dorchester, mixed income neighborhoods near […]

Making a Difference With Youth Mentors

By NANCY H. TILGHMAN Published: April 18, 2004 in the New York Times TAQUIOYA CAUSEY is 16 years old and has lived in at least 12 foster homes. She said that she couldn’t remember her father’s voice, and that her mother, a substance abuser, abandoned Taquioya and her older brother Kevin in Westbury six years […]

Don’t miss this webinar on Trauma-informed mentoring

A New Lens for Mentoring: Trauma Informed Care Thursday, March 19, 2015 1:00 PM – 2:15 PM EDT Trauma Informed Care may be a new term for those supporting children and youth in mentoring programs, but it has been a framework for psychological treatment that involves understanding, recognizing, and responding to the effects of all […]

A funny thing happened on the way to the Summit

by Jean Rhodes Senator Al Franken addressed a gathering at the Library of Congress last week and shared some good news and a funny story. First the good news. Senator Franken (D, MN) assured the crowd that we will soon see the passage of The Child Protection Improvements Act (CPIA), which will enable all programs to access […]

LGBTQ Terms That Every Mentor Should Know

Fenway Health recommends that its providers maintain a level of cultural competence in order to best serve their LGBTQ clients, and one element of this is having a working vocabulary surrounding LGBTQ life and health. In the same spirit during National LGBTQ History Month, mentors should also work to build vocabulary around LGBTQ issues in […]

On mentoring and wheat

by Jean Rhodes A call to action in youth mentoring Ron Haskins, the co-director of the Center on Children and Families at the Brookings Institution recently wrote a New York Times OpEd in which he made a strong case for the use of evaluation and evidence in social programs. As he notes, “Despite decades of efforts and trillions […]

Mentoring Youth of Incarcerated Parents: My Experience Volunteering at Big Brothers Big Sisters

Associate editor’s Note: The following article by Dr. Tim Cavell was originally published on The Huffington Post and is republished with permission of the author. In the recent past, The Chronicle of Evidence-Based Mentoring has published content exploring how children of incarcerated parents can benefit from a caring adult mentor. We learned from The Rev. Dr. W. […]

Reflections on being mentored

by Noelle Hurd I recently had the opportunity to reflect on the ways in which my experiences being mentored in academia had influenced the way that I currently mentor students at my university. I was applying for an academic mentoring workshop through the William T. Grant Foundation, and (as a part of the application process) was asked […]