Welcome to the NMRC Blog!

The National Mentoring Resource Center has been providing technical assistance, training, and reviews of mentoring research and resources for almost one year now. In fact we recently posted 18 evidence-based reviews of programs and specific practices. But in spite of all this outreach and engagement of the youth mentoring community, we realized that there was more we could do to bring information and innovations to practitioners, policymakers, and researchers. This new blog represents one strategy in providing you with more access to insights, opinions, and fresh information that can strengthen your programs and build a true community of mentoring professionals nationally.

The NMRC blog will feature frequent posts from seasoned mentoring program staff and updates on new trends and innovations from established technical assistance providers and researchers. We want to bring more voices and more conversation to the NMRC work. And to that end, we’re happy to include reader comments with these posts. So if you read something provocative, interesting, or complex in this space, please join in the conversation and share your thoughts and wisdom!

• You can always be informed about new blog posts by following the NRMC via MENTOR’s Twitter feed @MENTORNational
• You can leave comments and share your thoughts by logging in with your Facebook account or clicking on ‘Register’ to create an account below

We hope to be posting new content here every few weeks, especially in conjunction with releases of new publications and content that we know you’ll like to hear about and discuss. To kick things off, we have a post from Deborah Neary and Whitney Mastin from Midlands Mentoring Partnership which discusses their innovative new Youth-Initiated Mentoring project and some of the lessons they have learned so far. This exciting new strategy is really getting tested in some new ways in their work and we think our field needs to talk about the potential (and pitfalls) of this approach to mentor recruitment.

We hope you enjoy this new feature and encourage you to share your thoughts and topic ideas in the comments section below!