Profiles in Mentoring: Amy Salazar on Effective Mentoring for Foster Care Youth

Amy M. Salazar, PhD., is an Associate Professor of Human Development at Washington State University Vancouver, where her research focuses on child welfare systems, youth aging out of foster care, and postsecondary access and success for young people with foster care experience. Her work emphasizes intervention development, program evaluation, and improving outcomes for LGBTQ+ youth in care. We recently had the opportunity to speak with Dr. Salazar about her research on postsecondary support interventions, focusing on a mentoring component for foster youth, featured in here The Chronicle of Evidence-Based Mentoring.

Chronicle (C): What first sparked your interest in studying mentoring for youth with foster care experience, and how did your work on the Fostering Higher Education program shape the questions you wanted this study to answer about real-world implementation?

Amy Salazar (AS): My work has focused on older youth transitioning from foster care to adulthood, and in particular finding ways to meaningfully support their postsecondary goals, for a long time. Mentoring is one possibility for doing just that, so we decided to include it as one of our FHE intervention components. A lot of organizations are interested in doing postsecondary-focused mentoring with youth with foster care experience, but it is really hard to do that well, so we wanted to offer the field some useful insights we had over the course of our implementation.

C: As you analyzed lessons learned across mentor recruitment, training, matching, and closure, which implementation challenge proved most persistent or surprising to you, and why do you think it continues to be so difficult for organizations to address?

AS: When I conducted the first pilot study of FHE, it was challenging for us to recruit mentors – we had to put a lot of time and effort into connecting with interested people. I was hopeful that it would be easier for well-known, highly respected community organizations to recruit large mentor pools given their community connections, but that didn’t end up being the case. Asking people to sign on to be a long-term mentor is a big ask, no matter who is doing the asking!

C: Your findings emphasize the dual importance of procedures and relationships. How do you see programs striking a realistic balance between building strong infrastructure and maintaining the relational depth that youth with foster care experience need?

AS: I think that it is super important for relationships to come first, before everything else. Procedures go out the window if people (mentors and youth alike) aren’t engaged and connected. You can have the best procedure plan, but without the people you have nothing.

Read the full paper here.