MARCH 6, 2019
BY: NURY CRAWFORD, GWINNETT COUNTY PUBLIC SCHOOLS

Gwinnett County Public Schools’ Community-Based Mentoring Program in Gwinnett County, Georgia plays an important role in our school district’s efforts to support students. In 2008, our CEO/Superintendent created the program to address a need in our community—a need to support underserved African American young males.

The success of the program and its students led to expansion of the program, which now serves African American female students and Hispanic students as well. The mission of our program is to provide mentoring to our students to enhance their social and academic development, resulting in their growth as successful and responsible young adults.

JANUARY 16, 2018
BY: MENTOR: THE NATIONAL MENTORING PARTNERSHIP

January is National Mentoring Month, an annual mentoring campaign nationwide dedicated to celebrating and elevating the mentoring movement. This month, here at MENTOR: The National Mentoring Partnership, we are celebrating the power of relationships. This month, we reflect on the growth of the mentoring movement, recognize the need to continue to recruit new mentors, and offer opportunities to thank the mentors who have positively impacted our lives. Join us in celebrating mentoring and the positive effects it has on young people.

DECEMBER 13, 2018
BY: MERLYNE PIERRE, PROGRAM MANAGER, MENTOR: THE NATIONAL MENTORING PARTNERSHIP

As 2018 comes to a close, the NMRC team would like to thank this community of mentoring and youth development practitioners, researchers, advocates and others for your relentless work to support youth across America and equip them with relationships, skills, and experiences to achieve their goals. Now is a great time for us to think back on what we have accomplished, and start mapping out the groundwork for the work 2019 has in store.

For the OJJDP NMRC, 2018 has been an exciting year of spotlights on mentoring programs, research, and updates on existing tools and evidence reviews. The NMRC Research Board published an online module on Supporting and Inspiring Native Youth along with an evidence review on mentoring for youth with disabilities, look out for more content coming soon on mentoring for American Indian and Alaska Native youth. Additionally, program reviews were added, which provided insight on the Peraj Mentoring Program, don’t forget to read the Insights for Practitioners. Updates were made to practice reviews with additional secondary data analysis, such as Pre-Match Mentor Training and the Measurement Guidance Toolkit, which now includes 9 new measures of mentoring relationship quality for use in mentoring program evaluations. Supplementary Research Board-reviewed resources were added, including How to Build a Successful Mentoring Program Using the Elements of Effective Practice for Mentoring, and we launched new podcast series, Reflections in Research.

DECEMBER 11, 2018
BY: CAMILLE BRUGH AND AMANDA STEWART, BIG BROTHERS BIG SISTERS (BBBS) CENTRAL INDIANA

Big Brothers Big Sisters (BBBS) Central Indiana

MENTOR brings you a second blog post from our series of highlighting the work of grantees from the Mentoring Enhancement Demonstration Project (MEDP) funded by the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention. This innovative project, which began in FY 2012, was intended to test whether mentoring programs could make enhancements to their usual services that strengthened mentors’ ability to serve as advocates and take on more of an explicit teaching role with their mentees. The hope was that this approach might strengthen mentor-mentee relationships and lead to stronger outcomes for youth.

Now that the evaluation of the project is coming to a close, we wanted to highlight the unique and innovative approaches to teaching and advocacy developed by several of the funded organizations. These posts highlight their excellent work and can illustrate for other mentoring programs how they might approach program improvements and participate in research projects in the future. The National Mentoring Resource Center thanks each grantee for their contributions to the project and for sharing their reflections with us here.

To capture the experience of Big Brothers Big Sisters (BBBS) Central Indiana, we decided to learn more about the project through an interview. Check out what they had to say below and feel free to leave a comment!