Partners for Youth with Disabilities

Program Overview and Background

Mentor Match is the flagship program of Partners for Youth with Disabilities (PYD), serving youth with disabilities ages 6-24 since 1985. Through one-to-one mentoring, the program helps young people with disabilities meet their full potential for personal development and independence by matching them with a caring adult mentor. Over the course of a year, matches meet in person or virtually for at least four to six hours a month and are in touch on a weekly basis by phone or email. Mentees and mentors engage in a variety of activities together: work on personal goals, visit museums, attend sporting events, play games, do art projects, and more. To ensure quality outcomes, Mentor Match is structured according to the best practices for mentoring as established by MENTOR: The National Mentoring Partnership. As a result of having these strict standards, the Mentor Match program was selected as an inaugural member of the Massachusetts Mentoring Partnership’s quality-based mentoring initiative in 2008, certifying that the program meets the highest standards in the field.

Program Services

PYD aims to help young people with disabilities meet their full potential for personal development and independence by matching them with a caring adult mentor. Matches work on goals relating to building positive and healthy relationships, community involvement, self-esteem, independent living skills, and educational/career skills. PYD matches each youth with a caring adult mentor using a best-fit model and is expected to meet for 4-6 hours a month, in-person or virtually (depending on comfort level due to the pandemic), over the course of a year. Mentors and mentees work on goals related to independent living, self-esteem, community involvement, healthy relationships, and educational or vocational advancement and do all sorts of things together: work on personal goals, go to museums, play games, and more. Matches also have access to PYD’s online mentoring program, which focuses on career development and includes group mentoring opportunities and skills-building workshops to improve career readiness.

Target Population

We aim to provide mentoring under this grant to Youth with Disabilities.

Mentor Recruitment and Training

• 194 matches and youth served under this grant
• 184 mentors recruited under this grant
• Peer Mentoring included in programming
• For mentor recruitment, we target Adult Volunteers
• Duration of program services: 1 year
• Expected intensity of match contact: 4-6 hours per month
• Expected length of a match: 1 year
• Expected frequency of match contact: 1 time per week
• Number of training hours required before a mentor is matched with a youth: 4 hours
• Access to Partner’s for Youth with Disabilities online learning platform, LEARN