The Case for Credible Messengers

Jean Rhodes

Credible messenger mentoring is a community-rooted approach in which adults who have lived through incarceration, gang involvement, community violence, or related experiences are recruited, trained, and paid to mentor young people walking similar paths. The idea traces to 1979, when a group of incarcerated men led by Eddie Ellis imagined a movement of currently and formerly incarcerated people drawing on their own histories to lift up the communities they came from (Lesnick, Abrams, Angel, & Barnert, 2023). What was once a grassroots vision has become a national practice. Lived experience mentoring is the broader category and now includes peer mentors who share experience with mental health challenges, commercial sexual exploitation, chronic illness, and other circumstances that traditional mentor pools have rarely reflected (Blum, 2021; DuBois, 2024). The premise is straightforward. Young people who have been told for years that adults do not understand them are sometimes right, and a mentor who has stood where they stand can reach them when no one else can.

The scale of the work has grown quickly. New York City’s Department of Probation launched the Arches Transformative Mentoring program in 2012 with a 10 million dollar investment from Bloomberg Philanthropies, eventually contracting with 19 community-based organizations to mentor young adults on probation (Lesnick et al., 2023). The Washington, D.C. Department of Youth Rehabilitation Services built its Credible Messenger Initiative around full-time mentors serving youth ages 14 to 21 who are committed or post-committed to the agency. Youth Advocate Programs operates credible messenger and life coaching services across more than 30 states . City and county initiatives now reach communities from Milwaukee and Racine to King County, Onondaga County, Harris County, and Middlesex County, and the Credible Messenger Justice Center anchors a national network (Lesnick et al., 2023). Federal investment has followed practice. And, the National Institute of Justice devoted its FY23 youth mentoring research solicitation entirely to credible messenger programs.

DuBois (2024) reviewed the available studies and concluded that programs built around credible messengers, along with those that match young people to mentors from the same neighborhoods, show early signs of lowering recidivism and gun violence involvement, with tentative indications of improved educational outcomes as well. The Arches Transformative Mentoring program in New York City, evaluated with a quasi-experimental design, produced reductions in felony re-conviction for participating young adults relative to a comparison group (Lesnick et al., 2023). And, qualitative work consistently shows that shared experience can build emotional closeness quickly, reduce stigma around help-seeking, and create a sense of community in group settings that traditional one-to-one matches rarely achieve (DuBois, 2024; Lesnick et al., 2023).

As DuBois’ 2024 analysis notes, it’s less clear is whether lived experience mentors produce better outcomes than mentors without that experience. There is some evidence that effects vary across narrow age bands, with late adolescents and young adults sometimes responding differently to the same program. And programs report difficulty getting young people to attend at intended levels, and they report that mentor readiness, particularly for group facilitation, can be uneven (DuBois, 2024).

These notes of caution suggest that additional scaffolding and funding is needed. Lived experience is invaluable but it’s not enough and sufficient evidence-based training  and supervisionis needed.  Likewise,  need sufficient supervision. Likewise,credible messenger programs depend on adults who often face structural barriers to employment because of their own histories, and the model treats those adults as professionals doing skilled work  who should be paid accordingly(Lesnick et al., 2023). Likewise, funders who want this model to scale should be willing to invest in the kind of evaluation that aligns with the model itself.

The young people these programs serve are the ones the broader mentoring field has historically reached least well. They are also the ones whose lives change most when a relationship is strong. We owe the credible messengers who do this work the infrastructure to do it well and sustainabl

References

 

Blum, A. (2021). Evidence review: Mentoring and lived experience mentoring. Joan B. Kroc Institute for Peace and Justice, University of San Diego. https://www.sandiego.edu/peace/institute-for-peace-justice/

DuBois, D. L. (2024). Credible messenger and lived experience mentoring programs. National Mentoring Resource Center Evidence Review. Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention. https://nationalmentoringresourcecenter.org/

Lesnick, J., Abrams, L. S., Angel, K., & Barnert, E. S. (2023). Credible messenger mentoring to promote the health of youth involved in the juvenile legal system: A narrative review. Current Problems in Pediatric and Adolescent Health Care, 53(11), 101435. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cppeds.2023.101435