Incorporating Evidence-Based Cultural Frameworks into Mentoring

During my work in the formal mentoring field and youth development, I have surprisingly seen little research incorporating culturally responsive frameworks for mentoring youth of color. Seemingly, much of the mentoring research continues to remain void of references that illustrate the unique and historical coping strategies symbolizing the strength and resilience of people of color, Black people in particular. Since the largest number of identified youth in MENTOR’s: Examining Youth Services Across America report reports over 75% of the children and youth served are youth of color and 30% are African-American, my observation is even more distressing.

Whether working in small cities or culturally diverse suburbs, I also noticed programmatic approaches that were often “deficit based” and “culturally irrelevant” to the communities being served. Instead of identifying, incorporating, and celebrating the individualized coping skills and community-based adaptations developed by African American communities, many of these approaches were over-focused on prevention and intervention. As a result, I found refuge in reviewing and utilizing the practice-based curriculum about the African-centered rites of passage from experts, e.g. Paul Hill, Dr. Nsenga Warfield-Coppock and a dissertation by Dr. Keith Alford.

For several decades, psychological research has been criticized for its overreliance on Eurocentric theories and methodologies to explain the behavior of African Americans and people of color. Two decades later, while preparing for a training on mentoring African-American boys and young men, I was introduced to Phenomenological Variant of Ecological Systems Theory (PVEST). PVEST, was developed in 1995 by Dr. Margaret Beale Spencer and builds off the influential research of Dr. Urie Bronfenbrenner’s Ecological Systems Theory. However, PVEST examines the strengths and resiliency of African-American adolescents situated in the social, historical, and cultural context in which African-Americans adolescents often develop.

The APA Task Force on Resilience and Strength in Black Children and Adolescents, refers to PVEST theory as,

“A seminal and important contribution to the study of resilience among African American children and youth” because it is “one of the only theories taking into account the “ecological contextual circumstances unique to youths of color in the United States.”

My first inclination to all of this was, “This is a mouthful of jargon, and how could I accurately explain this concept to people in the mentoring field?” On the other hand, breaking down its significant and relevant approach was a task I was willing to take on. PVEST offers mentoring program coordinators a cultural specific, research based framework to train and prepare mentors to better understand the behaviors of the youth of color they will work with, which includes the following:

1. Risk and Protective Factors
2. Net Stress
3. Reactive Coping Strategies
4. Emerging Identities: Stable Coping Responses
5. Coping Outcomes

To give us a common language and approach in the mentoring field, in the next 3 blog posts I will focus on explaining the PVEST theory and how it could be used in today’s mentoring practices. Look out for the next post about the PVEST framework!