Important New Evaluation Highlights the Promise (and Limits) of CBT-Informed Mentoring
By Jean Rhodes
A new randomized controlled trial of the YMCA’s Reach and Rise program, led by Roger Jarjoura and colleagues and published in the American Journal of Community Psychology, deserves close attention (Jarjoura et al., 2026). It offers rare experimental evidence that a volunteer mentoring program grounded in cognitive behavioral principles can reduce externalizing problems, specifically delinquency and substance use, while improving school connectedness. Yet the study’s null findings on internalizing outcomes like depressive symptoms, happiness, and life satisfaction suggest we need to think more carefully about what mentors can realistically contribute to youth emotional well-being and what infrastructure programs need if they want to address the internalizing difficulties that increasingly drive the youth mental health crisis.
The Reach and Rise Model
At first glance, Reach and Rise resembles traditional community-based mentoring. YMCA sites recruit, screen, and match volunteer adults one to one with youth referred for behavioral or family concerns, with mentors committing to weekly meetings over a year. What sets the program apart is the deliberate integration of cognitive behavioral therapy, or CBT, into the match. Each site is led by a director with mental health credentials who delivers 15 hours of pre-match training organized into 10 modules covering youth development, cultural awareness, and CBT-informed skills (Jarjoura et al., 2026). Mentors learn to identify unhelpful thinking patterns such as catastrophizing and to respond with mindfulness, cognitive reframing, and positive reinforcement, all woven into everyday activities like playing sports or sharing meals.
Rigorous Evidence, Mixed Results
Methodologically, this evaluation stands out in a field often dominated by small, quasi-experimental trials. The team randomly assigned 600 youth ages 17 and under across 33 YMCA sites to either Reach and Rise (n = 316) or a waitlist control group (n = 284), with outcomes assessed via youth and caregiver surveys 15 months after enrollment using an intent-to-treat approach (Jarjoura et al., 2026). Response rates were strong, at 85 percent for youth and 84 percent for caregivers.
The externalizing findings depart from the modest, diffuse effects typical of mentoring research. Reach and Rise youth were significantly less likely to report delinquent behavior (8% versus 15%) and showed lower rates of substance use (28% versus 43%) (Jarjoura et al., 2026). Mentored youth also reported greater school connectedness (d = 0.27), and caregivers noted higher academic performance (d = 0.21) and marginally greater family connectedness (d = 0.18, p = .05) (Jarjoura et al., 2026). The trial detected no significant differences, however, on the internalizing measures, including depressive symptoms, happiness, hope for the future, and life satisfaction. Reach and Rise influenced externalizing behavior and engagement in key developmental contexts but not young people’s internal emotional states.
Why No Movement on Internalizing Outcomes?
That pattern doesn’t mean mentors can’t affect depression and emotional well-being. Prior research has found that mentoring can reduce youth depressive symptoms, particularly when relationship quality is high and matches last longer than a year (Browne et al., 2022; Herrera et al., 2023; Raposa et al., 2019). But it does mean we need to understand what conditions are necessary for those gains to emerge and why they didn’t show up here.
The implementation data point to several likely explanations. Only about 55 percent of mentors reported at least monthly contact with their program director, and nearly 6 percent were never contacted at all (Jarjoura et al., 2026). Monthly check-ins were supposed to be the primary vehicle for coaching and reinforcement of CBT strategies, so when they didn’t happen, mentors were left to figure things out on their own. The strategies mentors found easiest, like celebrating success and creating new habits, were the ones they used most, while the techniques closest to actual cognitive therapy for depression and anxiety, like journaling and mood mapping, were rated the most difficult and used least often (Jarjoura et al., 2026). It’s precisely those harder-to-implement strategies, the ones targeting thought patterns and emotional awareness, that would be most relevant to internalizing symptoms.
There’s also the question of who was being served. It’s plausible that the YMCA Reach and Rise sample had, on average, lower levels of internalizing symptoms at baseline and thus less room to show improvement on measures of depression and life satisfaction. Without stratification by risk level, we can’t know whether the CBT components might have worked for the subgroup of youth with elevated depressive or anxiety symptoms.
Implications
Taken together, these findings raise important questions about what’s needed to move the needle on depression and related markers of well-being. Training alone is probably not enough. What distinguishes effective paraprofessional mental health interventions from less effective ones is not just initial preparation but ongoing, structured clinical supervision tied to specific cases (Durlak, 1979; Verhey et al., 2020). For programs that want to contribute meaningfully to youth internalizing problems, the Reach and Rise findings point toward several practical steps.
First, programs should screen youth at intake for internalizing symptoms, not to exclude them, but to identify those who may benefit from a higher level of training and supervision for their mentors, closer integration with clinical services, or both. It’s also noteworthy that nearly half of caregivers at enrollment reported that their child was already receiving mental or behavioral health services (Jarjoura et al., 2026). Better coordination with those providers could strengthen program impact without asking mentors to function as therapists. Helping a young person stay engaged with a therapist, practice coping skills in everyday settings, or use an evidence-based mental health app is different from asking a volunteer to deliver cognitive restructuring. The first set of tasks plays to mentors’ natural strengths. The second requires a level of supervision and fidelity monitoring that programs should build toward deliberately rather than assume will happen on its own.
Second, programs should invest in ongoing clinical supervision of mentors working with youth who have internalizing concerns, including structured case consultation that helps mentors recognize when a young person’s struggles exceed their capacity and when a referral is needed.
The Reach and Rise trial can be seen as a promising example of what that future might look like. It demonstrates that mainstream mentoring organizations can embrace a paraprofessional identity, train volunteers in evidence-based strategies, and produce measurable gains for youth. The next step is building the screening, supervision, and clinical partnerships that would allow programs to extend those gains to the internalizing difficulties where young people and their families increasingly need help most.
