Mentoring Center Gains New Director | NW Report: November/December 2001

Mentoring Center
Gains New Director

At ETR Associates in Scotts Valley, California, Mark Fulop guided the work of state and national resource centers, providing assistance and information to thousands of agencies working in national service, tobacco use prevention, service learning, and more. As the new director of the National Mentoring Center, Fulop brings 15 years of experience in public health and social services to the Laboratory. He shared some of his thoughts with Northwest Report.

Q: What drew you to accept this position?
Fulop: My interest in coming to the Laboratory stems from an underlying theme of my professional career: building community and agency capability to address community needs. This includes a focus in youth development. Youth empowerment is never far from my professional core.

Q: What are the Center's primary responsibilities?
Fulop: The National Mentoring Center is funded by OJJDP [U.S. Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention] to support some 200 Juvenile Mentoring Program grantees. These grantees provide school- and community-based youth mentoring services all over the United States, Puerto Rico, Hawaii, and the Virgin Islands. As the National Mentoring Center, we're the resource center for all of those programs, with our work falling primarily into the areas of producing and disseminating print materials, including curriculum and training documents; serving as a resource center and free lending library; presenting conferences; and providing technical assistance for those working to build strong mentoring programs.

Q: What are your initial goals?
Fulop: I'd like to build on the Center's successes by taking a more systems view of what we do, both externally and internally, while continuing a strong commitment to research and practice. I've observed that the heart and soul of any successful mentoring program involves:

Program fidelity, meaning the program has a strong recruitment process, a core curriculum, and all the parts of the program are effectively integrated
Agency support, meaning that the agency hosting the mentoring program has the will and ability to facilitate the work of the program
Statewide and regional coordination in which individual mentoring programs are networked together

Q: Is the role of mentoring in youth empowerment changing?
Fulop: These days, you hear more about faith-based mentoring and mentoring of youth in foster care settings and young people re-entering from the juvenile justice system. Also, there's research being done into alternative models of mentoring. While we think of mentoring as one-on-one, there can also be team mentoring, two-on-two, or one mentor with 2-3 pupils. We're studying these alternative models which might enable us to match more young people with mentors.

Q: Have the September 11 attacks changed the context of youth mentorship at all?
Fulop: The number of children who lost parents is not trivial, so there's a commitment to ensure that those children who lost parents will be matched with mentors. Charitable giving is up, and organizations are finding that the increases in donations don't seem to be just a redirecting of gifts, but seem additive. There is now a more generalized commitment from people to their communities.

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