Profiles in Mentoring: Dr. Joel McGregor on Mentoring as an Intervention for Young People Aging Out of Out-of-Home Care

Joel McGregor, PhD., is a Senior Lecturer in Criminology at Swinburne University of Technology, where his research explores how risk, care, and responsibility are enacted in youth justice and out-of-home care systems, and how those systems can better honor the lived experiences and rights of young people. He is also the co-founder of the Responsible AI in Youth Sectors Network (RAIYSN), bringing together academics, youth workers, and policymakers to shape the ethical adoption of AI across Victoria’s youth sectors. We recently had the opportunity to speak with Dr. McGregor about his paper on reframing mentoring as an approach to redistributing social, cultural and symbolic capital, featured here in The Chronicle!

The Chronicle (C): What drew you to the intersection of youth mentoring and Bourdieu’s theory of capital? Was there a particular experience working with young people leaving out-of-home care that made you want to rethink how mentoring is theorized and practiced?

Joel McGregor (JM): One of the challenges of working with young people in out-of-home care (OoHC) is understanding the complex and deeply unfair circumstances of their lives, while also maintaining the hope that they can create a better future. Being in OoHC means these young people have had some terrible experiences. Working with them requires hope that they can make their lives better. Bourdieu’s theories offer a framework to think about how social context and individual agency influence each other and our lives. His theories provide a way to think through the things that have created the circumstance and maintain hope that things can change. Mentoring offers an opportunity to contribute and support the young person to use their agency to create change.

C: Your paper argues for a shift away from seeing mentoring as a charitable add-on and toward understanding it as a deliberate relational redistribution of capital. What do you think would need to change most fundamentally for that reframing to actually take place?

JM: To make that reframing real, I think the biggest shift would have to be institutional rather than interpersonal. We argue that mentoring works best when it is not treated as a short-term, benevolent “extra,” but as a structured way of addressing the relational inequalities that care-experienced young people face when they leave care. Young people often leave care without the informal networks that others rely on for advice, introductions, reassurance, and everyday problem-solving. Mentoring, in that sense, is less about goodwill and more about deliberately redistributing access to social capital, trust, and opportunity.

For that reframing to take hold, three things would need to change most fundamentally: policy and funding models; measurements of success; and, how institutions understand care. At heart, the shift is about seeing mentoring not as “helping the vulnerable,” but as partially correcting an unequal distribution of relational resources.

C: The study was originally designed to center the voices of care-experienced young women directly, and their non-participation became a significant reflection point in the research. How did that experience shape your thinking about ethical research practice with this population?

JM: The non-participation of care-experienced young women was one of the most important ethical lessons in the project. We had originally hoped to centre their voices directly, but in practice that was not possible, and the framework was therefore shaped more strongly by practitioners’ perspectives than we had intended. The report, upon which this publication is based, explicitly reflects on this limitation.

That experience reinforced several key lessons about ethical research with this population: access is not the same as ethical inclusion, and participation should not be rushed simply because a group is central to a study. Trust must come before data collection, as research can easily feel extractive without strong relationships and safeguards. It also highlighted the need for flexible, trauma-informed methods, and showed that non-participation can itself reveal important structural barriers, mistrust, or unmet support needs.

So rather than treating non-participation simply as a setback, it became a prompt to think more critically about power, timing, and responsibility in research. Ethical practice with care-experienced young people must prioritise safety, agency, and reciprocity, even if that means accepting limits on what a project can claim.

Read Dr. Joel McGregor’s full paper here