Posts

New Research Brief from OJJDP on impacts of risk on match outcomes

Written by Justin Preston The Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP) has recently released a Research in Brief piece on research conducted by a team of researchers at Mentoring Central, including Janis Kupersmidt, Katie Stump, Rebecca Stelter, as well as Jean Rhodes, (you can read the full brief here) around mentee risk status […]

Volunteer coaches as mentors: Tapping a natural resource

Click above to listen to Mentoring U’s Micheline Mann engage in a lively conversation with Program Director of an innovative coaching program, Project Coach. by Jean Rhodes  This week, we introduce a new podcast that explores a great program, Project Coach, which uses an innovative “cascading mentoring” model to engage students as both coaches and mentees. Mentoring U’s Micheline Mann engages […]

Three things mentors can do to help get youth through college

Written by Justin Preston, Associate Editor The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine have just completed an extensive review of the existing literature on ways of fostering college completion among youth today, and they have identified three specific factors that are not only key to college success, but also are able to be fostered […]

Predicting the future of mentoring programs

by Jean Rhodes I predict that formal mentoring programs will become increasingly specialized, professionalized, and evidence-based in the years ahead. This is a positive development, particularly given that our field’s two most important barometers of success—the number of adults willing to serve as volunteer mentors and the effectiveness of these efforts—have not changed in the past […]

Boosting the grade for school-based mentoring: Training and focus are key

Written by Marisa Ramirez Mentoring programs for school-aged children have grown in the past two decades, but their effectiveness has not kept pace with their popularity. A study from the University of Houston College of Education finds school-based mentoring programs fail because they lack sufficient time, mentor training and a research foundation. “While community-based mentoring […]

Want to get the most from a college internship? Add a mentor.

David Orenstein, Brown University College students who do summer research often say it was time well spent, but a new study offers hard data on exactly which components and experiences proved valuable and how. The study involved 450 participants in the Summer Research Early Identification Program of The Leadership Alliance, a national partnership among universities […]

Child Trends: Five ways trauma-informed care supports children’s development

Child Trends Contributors: Jessica Dym Bartlett, Kristin Anderson Moore, April Wilson, and Zakia Redd Childhood trauma is common. More than two thirds of children in the United States experience a traumatic event or circumstances—such as abuse or neglect, death of a loved one, or community violence—by the time they turn 16. Young children (birth to […]

Mentoring: A Key Part of the Conversation at White House Summit

By: Noelle Hurd I am just returning from a day-long summit at the White House. The summit was sponsored by FLOTUS’s office and was titled Beating the Odds: Successful Strategies from Schools & Youth Agencies that Build Ladders of Opportunity. The summit was part of the First Lady’s Reach Higher Initiative(https://www.whitehouse.gov/reach-higher) which broadly focuses on […]

Interested in aligning with the new EEPM? Participate in a study!

Are you involved in developing and supervising your mentoring program’s practices? Do you want to improve your practices? Quality Improvement activities focus on how well mentoring programs are implementing the standards and best practices of the field, such as those included within the Elements of Effective Practice for Mentoring (EEPM) published by MENTOR/National Mentoring Partnership. […]

Registration open for 1/19 webinar on risk management in mentoring

Risky Business: Developing your mentoring program’s risk management and safety policies  Do the risks of running a mentoring program sometimes keep you up at night?  Mentoring programs have inherent risks, but you can proactively take steps to minimize those risks – and maybe sleep a little better. A mentoring relationship cannot be considered effective unless […]