Profiles in Mentoring: Reagan Miller-Chagnon on Mentoring Youth Facing Adversity

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Reagan Miller-Chagnon is an Assistant Professor of Clinical Psychology at Colorado State University and director of the Adolescent Health Equity and Development (AHEAD) Lab. Her research focuses on reducing mental health disparities among adolescents exposed to trauma and adversity, with a particular interest in how contemplative practices like mindfulness can promote health equity. We recently had the opportunity to speak with Dr. Miller-Chagnon about her team’s focus on how risk factors moderate mentoring outcomes for high-risk adolescents, featured here in the Chronicle!

Chronicle (C): Was there a particular experience or observation that made you want to understand whether mentoring works differently depending on how much adversity a young person is carrying into the relationship?

Reagan Miller-Chagnon (RMC): Seeing youth who had been exposed to adversity come alive when they participated in the program was incredibly powerful. That experience sparked my interest in understanding whether their histories of adversity also shaped how much they benefited from the program.

C: One of the more counterintuitive findings in your study is that youth with greater individual risk factors actually experienced the largest reductions in internalizing problems, emotional difficulties, and delinquency, which runs against research suggesting that higher-risk youth tend to drop out more or form lower-quality mentoring relationships. What do you think it was about the structure and intensity of the Campus Connections program specifically that may have allowed higher-risk youth to benefit rather than disengage?

RMC: I think two key features of Campus Connections (CC) may help to explain this finding. First, it is a targeted mentoring program that provides one-on-one, skill-based programming specifically designed for youth exposed to both individual and environmental risk factors. We know that targeted programs often produce larger effects, and this focused approach likely enhanced outcomes for youth exposed to individual risk factors.

Second, CC mentors receive ongoing training and support throughout the program. Prior research suggests that youth exposed to higher levels of adversity are more likely to drop out of mentoring programs when relationships with their mentors are low quality. By investing in mentor training and supervision, CC likely fostered stronger, more consistent relationships, which in turn, may have supported better outcomes for youth.
C: Your findings suggest that economic and family risk factors did not moderate outcomes the way individual risk factors did, and you propose that this may be because the program addressed socio-emotional development but not the underlying economic stressors themselves. What do you think a mentoring program would look like if it were designed to more directly address those material conditions alongside the relational ones?
RMC: I don’t think mentoring programs necessarily need to be fundamentally redesigned. However, incorporating additional supports for families could help address some of these structural barriers more directly. For example, programs could provide parents or guardians with resources on accessing services such as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program or childcare subsidies. There may also be value in intentionally expanding youths’ access to broader social and professional networks. Exposure to individuals from a range of career paths and socioeconomic backgrounds can open doors, increase awareness of future opportunities, and provide access to spaces and conversations that might otherwise feel out of reach. Integrating these elements alongside relational mentoring could strengthen longer-term impacts, particularly for youth navigating economic adversity.
Read Dr. Miller-Chagnon’s full paper here