Resources

• Mentoring Children in Foster Care: Considerations and Partnership Strategies for Senior Corps Directors
  This toolkit is designed to help Senior Corps directors recruit, train, and place volunteers in mentoring programs serving foster youth. It can also help identify and establish productive partnerships with mentoring programs and other agencies that are part of the foster care system. Well-coordinated services between Senior Corps and other partners will increase the positive impacts of mentoring, enabling children to cope better with their circumstances and transition more successfully into adulthood.

• Mentoring for Young People Leaving Care
  From the United Kingdom's Joseph Rowntree Foundation: Mentoring for care leavers is a relatively recent development in the United Kingdom. This research builds on earlier mentoring research by the team from York University and was carried out in 14 mentoring projects supported by the Prince's Trust. The researchers looked at the impact of mentoring from the viewpoints of young people and their mentors, as well as outcomes for these young people.

• Mentoring as a Family Strengthening Strategy
  This policy brief from the National Assembly's Family Strengthening Policy Center describes findings that suggest youth mentoring that involves parents or caregivers hold significant promise for strengthening disadvantaged families with children. Lessons learned and policy recommendations as well as useful resources are included in the brief.

• Mentoring Programs and Youth Development: A Synthesis
  This synthesis examines the role that mentoring plays in helping youth develop a broad array of strengths and capacities. The report seeks to answer the following questions: What do mentoring programs look like? How do mentoring programs contribute to youth development? What youth outcomes can we realistically expect mentoring programs to achieve? What are the characteristics of effective mentoring?

• Guides for the Journey: Supporting High-Risk Youth with Paid Mentors and Counselors
  This paper from Public/Private Ventures explores the potential of an emerging approach to increasing the level and quality of adult involvement with high-risk youth: extended contact with a paid mentor-counselor. A small number of programs where this approach is being tested and refined show considerable early promise, and encouraging track records are beginning to emerge

• Mentoring Initiatives: An Overview of Youth Mentoring
  This product is the result of a Center for Substance Abuse Prevention (CSAP) initiative designed to assist parents and other adult caregivers with tools and strategies to intervene as mentors in the lives of their own children as well as the lives of their children's peers.

• Take 5 for Tots
  The Leader to Leader Institute highlighted this intergenerational mentoring program as an Innovation of the Week. The program is designed to enhance services offered to young abused and neglected children at Casa de Amparo in San Diego, CA. Senior mentors from the community volunteer their knowledge, time and experience to provide an increased focus on developmental needs, increase the number of positive relationships between children and adults, and provide one-on-one support to ensure these children are receiving the most that can be offer in those critical first years of life.

• Foundations of Successful Youth Mentoring: A Guidebook for Program Development
  Mentoring has become a popular strategy for helping youth stay on track, but setting up and sustaining a successful program takes some thought and know-how, according to this guidebook from the national mentoring center. The manual includes checklists to gauge the strength of your efforts, and a timeline for setting up new programs.

• The Progress of Education Reform 2006: Mentoring
  This policy brief from the Education Commission of the States provides an overview of different types of mentoring programs, benefits and potential adverse effects of mentoring programs, and mentoring as part of schoolwide reform efforts.

• Youth in Foster Care with Adult Mentors During Adolescence Have Improved Adult Outcomes
  This study from Pediatrics found that mentoring relationships are associated with positive adjustment during the transition to adulthood for youth in foster care.

Resources from the States

• New York City: Best Practice Guidelines for Foster Care Youth Mentoring
  Includes guidelines for building organizational capacity, working with mentors and mentees, and working with case workers.

NRCFCPPP Information Packet

• Mentoring by Michael Kasper (May 2002)

Websites

• MENTOR
  MENTOR is the home of the National Mentoring Institute and the Institute for Public Policy and State Affairs. Together, they provide the resources, tools and advocacy the mentoring movement needs to expand and meet America's mentoring needs. The National Mentoring Institute is MENTOR's resource arm. It offers a wealth of products and services to the entire mentoring field. The institute offers research, online training for mentors and mentees, community forums, products and a myriad of resources. It also houses the National Mentoring Database, the nation's most comprehensive source of information about more than 4,100 mentoring programs across the country.

• National Mentoring Center
  The National Mentoring Center is a project of the Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory, created and funded primarily by the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP).

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                               
Last updated 03/14/08