Tutor/Mentor Connection

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I've posted this message from: David Dubois . I encourage you to read the policy brief and add your comments in this forum, or email David directly with your comments. You can also request to join his email forum.

Dear Colleagues,

I'm pleased to share with you a policy brief on youth mentoring that my colleagues and I recently prepared. The brief can be found at the following link:

http://www.nwrel.org/mentoring/pdf/mentoring_policy_brief.pdf

We welcome hearing your comments/observations about the brief and how it may be relevant to the different activities and initiatives in which you are engaged. We also will very much appreciate any assistance that you can provide in letting those in your network know about the brief. If you can
apprise us of any wider distribution efforts you make that would be most appreciated. This will allow us to minimize duplicated efforts/multiple distributions to the same groups.

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One of the first comments that I read was this one:

Dear All:

Pardon me if this is a bit off topic. I read the brief and liked it except for one thing. That's the use of the term "at risk youth" in the title. Maybe I'm out in left field, but isn't mentoring a way to change the environment so that youth of all ages are given access to the opportunity to engage in a structured, healthy relationship? What the child learns in this relationship s/he transfers to others within the environment and we see the outcomes the brief lays out.

If this holds water, then the title is a misnomer - it is the environment that contains risk, and the term shouldn't be used as an adjectival label. This simply reproduces the "blame the victim" ethos of another century.

Didn't California's Department of Education adopt the risk and protective factor framework a decade or so ago, and after a couple years abandon it because its users focused on "at-risk youth" (individual children) rather than the domains within the environment where risk (and most protective factors) exist?

Am I tilting at windmills???

Jeffrey Olson MSW PhD, Chairperson
Department of Social Work
Oglala Lakota College
Pine Ridge Reservation, SD


I agree with Jeffrey, which is why I use maps to focus on the neighborhoods where tutor/mentor programs are needed, based on high concentrations of poverty, poorly performing schools, and too much street violence and other barriers to learning and living a life outside of the boundaries of poverty.

I feel I'm "tilting at windmills, too".
My own comments about the policy brief.

First, on Dec. 5, 2007, I posted comments about a Public Private Ventures policy brief on the same topic, which you can find here. My feelings have not change.

My overall observations of this Policy Brief are that they focus on the acts and results from mentoring, and not on the infrastructure needed to support good mentoring programs in more of the places where such programs are most needed.

Thus, my comments are suggestions that might expand the body of research, or help focus on research that might need to be done.


Barriers to widespread effectiveness

I’d add these

Lack of flexible, on-going funding; costs of fund raising
This is the biggest barrier and it influences the observations offered by David and his team. I believe that flexible funding is needed to provide operating dollars at different programs. This flexible funding needs to be provide on an on-going basis. Donors should learn to look at a web site, or do a site visit, and know if a program deserves continued funding or not. Grant proposals don’t tell the story and own eat up precious time and money, as well as leadership energy and commitment.

Lack of Leadership Development Program that starts at High School and continues through college and combines classroom theory and hands on learning.
You learn to mentor, by mentoring. You learn to mentor mentors, and lead these programs, through doing it. The longer you are involved, and the longer the kids and volunteers are connected, the greater the benefit. In a volunteer based program you need to mentor the volunteer as much as you need to mentor kids. Working with volunteers can be more difficult than working with kids. Yet, unleashing the time, talent and resources of volunteers is what makes a program great. We need people to come into leadership positions already knowing what has been learned by others and by researchers. We need funding streams that keep people in programs for decades, not just one or two years.

Too much focus on academic goals and short term impacts - I have 70 pairs of kids/volunteers, ranging from 6th graders to 12th graders. They are all different. They are all constantly changing. The volunteers are all different and they keep changing. Some kids stay a few months or a year or two. Some stay 5 or 6 years. Some are staying connected to us and the program beyond high school, or beyond the years they are active in the program. They are now beginning to tell us how much they feel the program has helped them. This is a “thank you” measure of impact.

The national emphasis on outcomes that align with short term goals, and with academics, makes it more difficult to find the flexible funding for programs that focus on relationships and the long term impact of these. Here’s a presentation by Dr. Michael Wooley of the University of Chicago, which shows how kids with extra adults do better than those without. Jump to page 16 for Dr. Wooley's presentation.


Maybe there should be a category titled, What we don’t Know, which would feed into the “Next Steps” part of this policy brief.

Here are some things I’d add:

Is there research being done to build on this idea of “social capital” or “bridging capital” and how volunteers from non poverty are a valuable source of “bridging capital” for kids in high poverty neighborhoods?

How do we show the impact of mentoring when it is different for each kid, and it is influenced differently by the things that go on in the neighborhood and family of each kid. These things change from week to week, and year to year.

Is there a different set of measures we should be looking at, such as stories from kids, volunteers, which are collected in the years beyond when they were first connected to a mentor in a mentoring program?


How much are mentoring program leaders, (volunteers, board members, funders, staff, etc.) drawing from existing research on poverty, school drop out, education, etc to inform their research and their actions. Has any research been done to learn “what are you reading? Or Where are you learning?” Links here and here would be recommended reading that I might point to.


What research is looking at the distribution of programs based on demographics and age group served? What research on outcomes is then basing its conclusions on a comparison of similar programs serving similar demographics and age groups? The original PPV research based on BBBS tracks age 9-13 kids who don’t all come from the highest areas of poverty, and does not show how many of these kids remain in longer term relationships with mentors, and what they are saying when they are older about the impact of the mentoring program on their journey from first contact to the present.

What do we know about how the business community views volunteer involvement in a youth mentoring program? Do they see benefits to their current employee skills and company loyalty? Do they see this as a way to influence youth choices of future careers? Do they fund these programs based on these benefits?

Funding – this is critically important.

What do we know about the impact of different funding streams. Government funding is restrictive and prescriptive. It does not encourage innovation. Yet mentoring is an innovative process, where each volunteer needs to adjust what he/she does on any given day based on student needs, as well as the time/talent/resources of the volunteer and the program that supports the volunteer.

What are we learning about what types of funding give the greatest support to the most effective programs? E.g., if we believe that longer term matches have greater impact, who funds on-going operations for more than a 2-3 year grant cycle? In the Jim Collins Book titled “Good to Great and the Social Sector” he talks about the process of becoming a great organization. In his book, Robert Herbold talks about the process of staying great once you get their in a book titled “Seduced by Success”.

We need to apply this thinking to what it takes to a) build great tutor/mentor programs that are operating where most needed; b) then sustain these great programs from the time a youth enters, to the time the youth is an adult able to take care of himself, his family, and be a mentor to someone else.

What do we know about long-term impact on volunteers? Or who the volunteers are? I focus on recruiting volunteers from the workplace who can mentor jobs and careers and open doors to interviews as kids get older. I focus on these volunteers because as they bond with kids some take on greater roles with the youth and the program and this is a strategy for sustainability. Is anyone collecting information about this?

Here is an animated essay illustrating the “service learning loop' that volunteers in a tutor/mentor program go through. Each time they meet with the youth they learn more about the issues the youth faces, and about mentoring, and about themselves. As they return to their family, work, social circles they share this information informally. The longer the volunteer stays involved, the more he/she knows about the youth and the issues the program deals with and the more likely he/she is to make an effort to tell others about the program and recruit resources to support the youth, his family, and the program. If this is happening in hundreds of programs it affects thousands of volunteers and creates an constantly expanding pool of volunteers and resources.

Are any researchers thinking about this process or studying it to see if my observations are true? If they are true, can this be a strategy we all use to build sustainability for programs working with kids who need our support for a decade or longer?

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