NWREL Aids National

Mentoring

Efforts

The field of mentoring is maturing as a discipline, with more variations on how it's practiced and more knowledge to draw from. The Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory's National Mentoring Center is expanding its presence in the field and sharing its expertise through two new contracts supporting federal mentoring initiatives.

A half-million dollar contract with the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention funds a seventh year of NWREL assisting almost 100 community-based mentoring programs that are part of the OJJDP Juvenile Mentoring Program (JUMP). JUMP focuses on improving mentees' academic achievement and preventing juvenile delinquency. A second $378,000 subcontract targets middle school students, promotes school-based mentoring that increases academic achievement in core subject areas, and seeks to decrease students' unexcused absences. Close to 300 programs, including 13 in the Northwest, are involved in the new U.S. Department of Education effort that is managed by EMT (Evaluation Management and Training) of Sacramento, California, and subcontracted to NWREL.

"Mentoring most often follows the traditional 'Big Brothers/Big Sisters' model, where mentoring takes place within the community," observes Mark Fulop, director of the National Mentoring Center, "but increasingly, mentoring programs are adopting other models including peer mentoring and site-based mentoring where the mentor and mentee only meet at school. There are also faith-based initiatives where religious values are brought into the relationship and even e-mentoring where mentoring occurs online." Fulop sees the expansion of such programs as a "double-edged sword": while there are more resources and more youngsters served, the array of mentoring models is growing faster than the research base. For example, it's still too early to say whether e-mentoring will produce the desired psychosocial results for students engaged in it.

Fulop notes that NWREL's experience in developing and managing safe and effective youth mentoring programs will be an asset to grantees that are new to mentoring or are adding another type of mentoring to existing programs (e.g., adding a school-based program to a community-based one). "We not only provide technical assistance with how to start and run a program but also offer guidance during episodic needs such as when a program experiences staff turnover," says Fulop.

The Center has just completed a workbook for OJJPD, Marketing for the Recruitment of Mentors. The Center is also working on an OJJDP publication about sustaining mentoring programs. A series of four publications on broad topics such as school-community partnerships, supporting relationships, conducting evaluations, and infusing academic standards into mentoring programs is planned for the U.S. Department of Education through the EMT subcontract.