A funder’s guide to identifying high quality mentoring programs: From indicators to red flags
Editor’s Note: Through a series of posts, we present, “Making the Most of Youth Mentoring: A Guide for Funders” In this post, Dr. Carla Herrera surveys different approaches to mentoring, highlighting the positive indicators and red flags Original Publisher(s): Public/Private Ventures. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License, with permission from the Foundation Center).
A Framework for Funders of Mentoring Programs: Recognizing high-Quality Mentoring Programs
by Carla Herrera, Ph.D.
Different mentoring models often serve distinct groups of youth, involve different types of volunteers, and typically aim to achieve different goals. These models thus carry with them different indicators of strength and distinct “red flags” (i.e., practices whose presence or absence may indicate a weaker program). In the following weeks, we will present six of the most common types of mentoring programs a. It should be noted that all mentoring programs, regardless of the particular model, should have the basic components listed in the previous section, including thorough background checks, training and regular, ongoing supervision for volunteers. The indicators presented here are in addition to those basics.
KEY FOR EVALUATING DIFFERENT APPROACHES
The programs will be rated on their evidence base and cost as follows:
EVIDENCE BASE
NOTE: It is important to distinguish between “being rigorously tested” (rated here) versus “being effective.” These scores do not reflect how effective a particular approach is, but rather how much research has been conducted on the approach to date, in part a function of age/prevalence of the approach.
COST
$ Least expensive.
$$ Based on costs for community-based mentoring. Early estimates were about $1,000 per youth per year; current estimates from practitioners are closer to$1,500.
$$$ Most expensive.
NOTE: Rigorous cost estimates do not exist for many mentoring approaches, and most that do are outdated. Thus, these categories are based on community-based mentoring costs (the “middle” category). The categories also have loose boundaries—programs can easily move up a category when using expensive curriculum, activities, expert mentors, extensive support, etc.
A COMMUNITY-BASED MENTORING APPROACH
This approach should be considered by funders who:
• WANT TO PROVIDE youth with:
- ✏ 3 to 4 hours a week of (typically) one-on-one, unstructured adult interaction.
- ✏ An adult friend who can expose them to a range of experiences and provide help and advice on a wide and varying set of topics.
- ✏ A program that can follow youth through residential moves.
• WANT TO SERVE youth:
- ✏ Across a wide range of ages.
- ✏ Who are comfortable spending time alone with a non-familial adult.
• WANT TO INVOLVE adult mentors:
- ✏ Who have access to reliable transportation.
- ✏ Who have 3 to 4 hours a week to volunteer.
- ✏ Who can commit to at least one year of regular meetings.
• WANT TO ACHIEVE:
- ✏ A wide range of effects, including improving relationships with peers and adults, decreasing delinquent behavior, and improving youth’s academic outcomes.
- ✏ Outcomes that are not conducive to a “site-based” approach that is implemented in a specific location, such as a youth-serving organization, school or workplace (e.g., exposure to new experiences in and outside of youth’s community).
- ✏ Long-lasting mentor-youth relationships.
Red flags for Community-Based programs:
SCREENING: Program does not provide extensive screening and supervision of volunteers, including driver’s license checks.
SUPERVISION: Program lacks a parent component in its match supervision, including a parent orientation; regular, ongoing communication with parents; and other strategies to ensure parental support of the match and child safety.
TRAINING: Program lacks in-person mentor training prior to the beginning of the match.
RECRUITMENT: Program primarily recruits mentors who may want or need more supervision or structure (e.g., youth mentors) than a community-based approach is typically structured to provide.
STRUCTURE: Program has very specific goals for youth (e.g., high school graduation) without providing mentors with related supports (e.g., structure, activity ideas and resources connected to those goals).
NOTE: It is important to distinguish between “being rigorously tested” (rated here) versus “being effective.” These scores do not reflect how effective a particular approach is, but rather how much research has been conducted on the approach to date, in part a function of age/prevalence of the approach.
A SCHOOL-BASED MENTORING APPROACH
This approach should be considered by funders who:
• WANT TO PROVIDE youth with:
- ✏ A group or one-on-one mentoring experience (structured or unstructured) that occurs in a context where there are adults to supervise and resources to support the match.
- ✏ About one hour a week of academic or social activities that are conducive to the school setting and calendar (i.e., during the school year).
• WANT TO SERVE:
- ✏ Younger youth with school-related needs who are typically referred by their teachers.
- ✏ Youth whose parents may not seek out a community-based mentoring program.
• WANT TO INVOLVE:
- ✏ Young or elder mentors with limited transportation.
- ✏ Volunteers who may need or want additional structure or supervision.
- ✏ Volunteers who want a more time-limited experience.
- ✏ Large groups of volunteers through a business or school (e.g., college- or high-school-aged mentors).
• WANT TO ACHIEVE:
- ✏ Benefits primarily in school-related attitudes, behaviors and experiences, including improvements in peer relationships and academic attitudes, as well as decreases in truancy and misconduct at school.
Red flags for School-Based programs:
SCREENING: Program does not conduct background checks appropriate for involvement in the school setting.
SUPERVISION: Program does not ensure regular, on-site supervision of match meetings. Program does not provide frequent one-on-one check-ins with mentors and troubleshooting outside of match meetings.
TRAINING: Program lacks mentor training about how to work within the school context (e.g., how/whether to include youth’s peers in interactions, how to work/interact with teachers and administrative staff).
STRUCTURE: Program serves high-school-aged mentees without modifying the model in ways that reflect this age group’s specific needs.
PARTNERS: School staff have no input into decisions about the program’s implementation (e.g., when, how and where it takes place).
- School staff have the only or primary input into decisions about the program’s central goals and content, potentially pulling the program away from its central theory of change.
- Program has no mechanism for collecting information from school staff on how it could be improved and for responding to these suggestions.
- Program lacks partnerships with supportive schools that are willing to invest resources (e.g., time, activities, computers, designated space for meetings) to help the matches succeed, or it lacks the capacity to create these partnerships.
STAFFING: The school does not provide a point person on site for mentors to turn to when problems arise.
A GROUP or TEAM MENTORING
This approach should be considered by funders who:
- ✏ A structured, group-based experience in which youth can interact with peers and one or more adults.
- ✏ A (typically) site-based approach with a consistent time and place for meetings.
This approach should be considered by funders who:
• WANT TO SERVE youth:
- ✏ Both in and beyond elementary school (particularly older youth who are attracted to opportunities for social interaction with peers).
- ✏ Who may be uncomfortable alone with a non-familial adult.
• WANT TO INVOLVE adult mentors:
- ✏ Who want a site-based approach with more structure.
- ✏ Who have experience and/or extensive training in managing groups of youth.
• WANT TO ACHIEVE:
- ✏ Social and behavioral goals for youth (e.g., developing social skills, providing increased opportunities for social interaction, improving problem behavior, etc.).
Red flags for Group or Team Mentoring programs:
SCREENING: Program does not implement rigorous screening, particularly when it includes unsupervised group/match meetings.
- Program does not implement group observation as part of the supervision process.
- Program does not incorporate “checks” to ensure that peers aren’t encouraging/modeling negative behavior.
TRAINING: Program does not provide volunteers with significant training in group dynamics and peer relationships.
POPULATION: Program exclusively or predominantly serves youth with aggression or other behavior problems (mixed groups with predominantly “lower-risk” youth will help avoid “contagion” effects in which youth adopt the negative behaviors of their peers).
- Program creates groups with a very high youth-to-mentor ratio or a ratio that does not “match” the goals it is trying to achieve or the types of youth it targets (e.g., youth with behavioral issues and groups with very individualized goals may need more focused adult attention).
- Program does not provide structure, activities and/or curriculum to focus group interactions.
CROSS-AGE PEER MENTORING
should be considered by funders who:
• WANT TO PROVIDE:
- ✏ Children with a supervised (typically school-based) opportunity to spend time with older peers and observe older youth modeling caring, supportive behavior.
- ✏ Older youth with opportunities for leadership, volunteerism, community building and positive interactions with peers.
• WANT TO SERVE:
- ✏ Younger youth, especially elementary-aged.
- ✏ Possibly middle-school-aged youth (increasing numbers of cross-age peer mentoring programs involve middle school youth being mentored by high school students; these matches require more programmatic support to avoid older peers modeling, and mentees adopting, negative behaviors).
• WANT TO INVOLVE:
- ✏ Large groups of high school student mentors.
- ✏ High school volunteers who want the opportunity to develop relationships with younger youth, to serve as leaders, to give back to their community, or to test whether they might want to pursue a career working with children.
- ✏ A cadre of teenage volunteers with the potential to improve the climate of their own high school, especially in schools where there may be limited opportunities for teens to engage in positive youth programming.
• WANT TO ACHIEVE:
- ✏ Improvements in older youth’s (i.e., mentors’) confidence in their academic abilities.
- ✏ Improvements in mentees’ relationships with peers and feelings of “connectedness” (i.e., feeling connected to school, parents and/or teachers).
- ✏ Potential for later volunteering among the mentors.
- ✏ Potential for improvements in school climate for both mentors and mentees.
Red flags for Cross-Age Peer Mentoring programs:
SCREENING:
- Program does not have a mechanism to identify and screen out volunteers who are over-committed or are volunteering solely to fulfill a course requirement.
- Program recruits full classes of student mentors without screening each individual student before allowing them into the course.
- Program does not provide in-person supervision for all match meetings (ideally additional staff or older peers help to lead meetings so that program staff can instead focus on carefully monitoring interactions among individual matches).
- Program lacks extensive pre- and post-match training for volunteers (for teens, pre-match training alone is insufficient).
- Program recruits full classes of student mentors when the classes are not specifically designed for mentoring.
- Program provides high school volunteers with course credit that isn’t clearly tied to the program’s guidelines (e.g., mentors receive credit before their time commitment is met).
- Program does not provide structure for match interactions (without an evidence-based curricula with activities that can unite mentors and mentees, matches will likely flounder, mentors may congregate with their peers rather than spending time with their mentees, and mentees may adopt negative behaviors).
- Program allows individual matches to meet in close proximity to other matches without structure and strategies to ensure that the mentor’s attention is focused on his or her mentee, rather than on peers.
PARTNERS:
- Program lacks partnerships with supportive high schools to provide volunteers—schools that are willing to invest resources (e.g., a designated class period for attending mentoring sessions, transportation to the host school) to help the program succeed, or it lacks sufficient capacity to create these partnerships.
E-MENTORING
should be considered by funders who:
• WANT TO PROVIDE youth with:
- ✏ A structured mentoring experience.
- ✏ A way to connect with a caring adult who may live far away.
- ✏ An opportunity to write and/or learn to express feelings in writing.
- ✏ Additional or intensive support with a project or specific area of study.
• WANT TO SERVE:
- ✏ Older youth who have access to the internet and comfort and experience using email.
- ✏ Youth who may prefer internet communication and/or have difficulty developing relationships through face-to-face interactions.
- ✏ Youth who have special needs (e.g., youth with disabilities) that might prevent them from developing an in-person relationship with an adult mentor.
• WANT TO INVOLVE:
- ✏ Adult volunteers with access to the internet and comfort and experience using email.
- ✏ Adults who have limited time and/or transportation to get to match meetings.
- ✏ Large groups of volunteers through a business or school.
- ✏ Volunteers who are isolated or have special needs (e.g., physical disabilities) that might prevent them from developing an in-person relationship with youth.
- ✏ Volunteers who are far removed geographically from the youth they will serve or are difficult to meet with in person (e.g., celebrities).
- ✏ Volunteers who share a particular interest with their mentees or have a specific skill youth would like to develop (i.e., the match has a platform from which it can begin a relationship without the benefit of in-person discussions).
• WANT TO ACHIEVE:
- ✏ Targeted outcomes (e.g., a specific academic skill or enhanced knowledge in a specific area), based on a curriculum or activities of focus.
- ✏ Increased use and comfort with internet-based communication.
Red flags for E-Mentoring programs:
SCREENING: Program does not implement rigorous screening comparable to that in more traditional programs.
- Program does not have an online system that includes significant checks for frequency of email exchanges, email content and child safety.
- Program does not provide supervision that is as frequent and intensive as that provided in more traditional mentoring programs.
- Program does not train volunteers in how to communicate with youth online in ways that are most likely to foster meaningful, effective relationships.
- Program does not have curricula and/or clear goals and discussion topics/prompts to help focus match interactions.
- Program does not include opportunities for social (i.e., non-task-focused) and face-to-face interactions, which may bolster program effects.
- Program does not have outlined standards for timing, length and frequency of communication (i.e., at least weekly), including turnaround time for email responses.
- Site-based programs do not have a program manager at the site (e.g., school) where youth participate in program activities (i.e., youth have no in-person guidance and support during their key communications with mentors).
- Program coordinators do not have experience supervising or working with people online.
A PAID MENTORING approach
should be considered by funders who:
• WANT TO PROVIDE:
- ✏ A long-term and/or intensive mentoring experience in which mentors receive additional training and support to serve challenging youth, and/or whose level of involvement requires mentors to be paid for at least some of their work with youth.
- ✏ An approach that ideally begins serving youth early (e.g., in the early years of school, as youth enter foster care, or before youth begin the reentry process).
• WANT TO SERVE:
- ✏ Youth who need a long-term and/or intensive, stable mentoring relationship.
- ✏ Youth who would benefit from a mentoring relationship that can stay with them through difficult transitions (e.g., from elementary to middle to high school, through residential moves in foster care, as part of reentry from institutional settings).
• WANT TO INVOLVE:
- ✏ Mentors with special training or expertise (or who are willing to engage in intensive training) to serve the type of youth the program targets.
- ✏ Mentors who are willing to commit to more time or more frequent, consistent meetings than volunteers in standard programs.
- ✏ Mentors who can see, support and build on the positive attributes of the youth they work with (i.e., are able to see beyond youth’s challenges).
• WANT TO ACHIEVE:
- ✏ Long-term changes that require a more lengthy or intensive mentoring experience.
- ✏ Improved outcomes for “higher-risk” youth, which are difficult to achieve in short-term programs (e.g., reduced recidivism, reduced drop-out rates, lower rates of teen pregnancy).
Red flags for Paid Mentoring programs:
- Program does not have mechanisms to screen out mentors who are motivated solely by payment.
- Program does not have multiple, regular (e.g., annual) screenings when mentors are involved for more than one year.
- Program does not have a mechanism to detect and counteract mentor burnout (a real risk, given the significant time commitment required and the challenges faced by many of the youth in these programs).
- Program lacks ways to acknowledge mentors’ significant contributions.
- Program lacks extensive and ongoing training for working with high-needs youth. Program lacks mechanisms to emphasize and foster long-term mentor involvement.
- Program does not offer regular opportunities for mentors to gather, share moral support and resolve match issues.
FUNDING: Program lacks a clear funding mechanism to sustain the paid component of the program.
Final Thoughts
As the mentoring field continues to grow and diversify, funders are reminded that no one program can achieve all goals for all youth. Funders need to think very carefully about whom they want to serve, what they hope to achieve and what resources they are prepared to invest. Mentoring has a wide research base to draw on, and when the right approach is selected and supported, mentoring programs can yield powerful effects for young people. Yet, there is still much to learn, particularly about the newer types of mentoring. We urge funders to invest in continued research—to determine not only whether these approaches work, but also how, for whom, and under what circumstances. This knowledge will help programs evolve in ways that are most likely to benefit youth and provide an even stronger foundation for funders’ decisions about which programs to support.