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Home > About MENTOR >

ABOUT MENTOR

From the start I was expected to lose. Everything I have right now is mostly because I defied what the world concluded about me before I could even speak a word in my defense. And my defense is that I am just as capable as any person to do great things. Like you, I think about all the things this world could achieve if only every child was given the right tools. Mentoring is the right tool and it is the way to the American Dream. To everyone here tonight, I hope you will promise to do everything you can to help make mentoring and the American Dream a reality for every child in this city and every other city in the country. It’s their best defense, too. -- Ean Garrett, Mentee at the MENTOR National Recognition Event

MENTOR exists for kids such as Ean Garrett. Like Ean, we believe that mentoring is a powerful tool for helping kids succeed in life. Our mission is to connect kids with the power of mentoring.

What We Do

For more than a decade, MENTOR/National Mentoring Partnership has been working to expand the world of quality mentoring. MENTOR believes that, with the help and guidance of an adult mentor, each child can discover how to unlock and achieve his or her potential. MENTOR is widely acknowledged as the nation's premier advocate and resource for the expansion of mentoring initiatives nationwide. As such, MENTOR works with a strong network of state and local Mentoring Partnerships to leverage resources and provide the support and tools that mentoring organizations need to effectively serve young people in their communities.

MENTOR recognizes that, although nearly 17.6 million young Americans need or want mentoring, only 3 million are in formal, high-quality mentoring relationships. That means more than 14.6 million young people still need mentors. That unmet need constitutes what we call the "mentoring gap." MENTOR works to close that gap.

How We Do Business

MENTOR focuses on three essential strategies designed to help bridge the mentoring gap.

• We build and support critical infrastructure at the state level, through our support of state Mentoring Partnerships, which serve as mentoring central for their states. These Mentoring Partnerships continue to produce inspiring, reality-tested solutions for mentoring's greatest challenges.
  
  
• We leverage knowledge and leadership through the National Mentoring Institute (NMI), a forum for the nation's foremost experts on mentoring. The NMI delivers a wealth of products and services to the mentoring field, highlights of which include a dynamic research agenda and the recently-updated Second Edition of the Elements of Effective Practice, the definitive guide to running high-quality mentoring programs.
  
  
• We generate support for mentoring's front line, the thousands of programs that run mentoring initiatives and need additional resources to broaden their reach. Thanks to innovative programs such as SafetyNET - a fast, efficient background checking system – and record levels of federal funding, the resources available to mentoring programs have never been greater.
  
  

How We Got Started

MENTOR was founded by philanthropists Geoffrey T. Boisi and Raymond G. Chambers in 1990. They founded the organization because, in conversations with kids across the country, they had discovered that many young people felt:

• No one cared about them. And the lack of caring adults in their lives sent these young people the message that they just didn't matter.

• They were cut off from our economic system. These young people felt the opportunities that many of us take for granted were out of their grasp.

Boisi and Chambers both agreed that a generation at risk is a nation at risk. They also agreed that a lack of caring adult role models to guide and support young people was at the heart of the problem.

Through MENTOR, they would push the need for mentoring into the national spotlight and help connect thousands more kids with caring adults.

Related Information

• MENTOR 2006 Annual Report (PDF)
• MENTOR 2006 Form 990 (PDF)
• MENTOR 2006 Audited Financial Statements (PDF)