Systemic Change in the Field of Mentoring: Moving away from unstructured, volunteer-based programming
To understand the systemic change we are creating across the field of mentoring, consider the following early-education-based analogy:
The field of early education has undergone a dramatic transformation as researchers identified the critical importance of shifting away from unstructured daycare centers into true quality early education. Our long-term vision is to support mentoring programs nationwide in adopting rigorous, universal standards for quality practice in mentoring of underserved youth.
What Accounts for the Systemic Change
We envision a shift away from the majority of youth mentoring programs as informal, unstructured and recreational in nature, into the development of a widely-adopted framework supporting structured mentoring relationships, differentiated in the following ways:
- Robust, evidence-based mentor trainings as a new industry standard
- Increased intensity of mentoring relationships
- Equipping mentors with skillsets appropriately matched to their mentees’ most critical developmental and academic milestones
- Program design that explores recruitment of non-volunteer-based mentors— for The Arthur Project, that means strategic partnerships with clinical training programs to place emerging clinicians as mentors
A Nationwide Impact on Youth Mentoring Programs
Ultimately, we are excited to contribute to a field-wide exploration of new standards for quality practice in youth mentoring, both in program content and structure. Our long-term vision is to support a variety of youth mentoring programs nationwide by offering trainings as well as a teachable framework.
The Arthur Project’s impact will move along two trajectories:
- The consolidation of relationship-focused research and the development of a framework which can be widely applied to a number of settings
- A gradual, national expansion of our direct service model
