Effective youth mentoring programs should be designed to intentionally honor cultural ways of knowing and being. This type of programming doesn’t happen by accident. Here are a few strategies for honoring different ways of knowing and being in your mentoring program:

• Be youth-led. When young people are authentically leaders and collaborators in a project, they integrate their culture and identities into a program. Not all youth mentoring programs are youth-led. In fact, few are. Articles and manuals on youth-adult partnerships can help you learn how to transform your youth mentoring program into a youth-driven organization.
• Participate in activities happening in your community led by activists and elders from American Indian/Alaska Native (AI/AN) communities.
• Engage mentors who are self-aware. Even if you have good intentions and a great program design, the wrong mentor can negatively impact or harm a young person. If you are not able to match AI/AN youth with mentors from within their own community, make sure your screening process looks for mentors who are aware of their own cultural norms and are willing to be youth-led. Provide training opportunities that ask mentors to explore their own identity and concepts like implicit bias, structural racism and the cultural iceberg. Check out Best Practices: Mentoring Native Youth, a guide from Boys & Girls Club of America, for additional program recommendations on recruiting, matching and training mentors who work with AI/AN youth.
• Understand the power of role models. Mentoring practitioners understand that role models are important for young people in the process of identifying their sense of self and future self. How is your idea of role models influenced by your cultural identity? Are you and mentors in your program well versed in AI/AN authors, artists, athletes, politicians, musicians, and historical figures?

We encourage you to spend some more time thinking about this chapter and how it applies to your role. Download the companion reflection guide to have a printable copy of the following reflection questions for this chapter:

For all audiences:

• What’s an example of structural vs. individual racism?
• What’s an example of cultural appropriation?
• Have you ever taken an implicit association test? If not, consider doing so via Harvard University’s Project Implicit. Reflect on your results—are you surprised?

For mentoring programs:

• In what ways are you training mentors to think about their own identity?
• 
  For mentors:
  Do your experiences significantly differ from your mentee’s?
• Knowing that your mentee is experiencing racism, bias, and structural challenges, what conversations are you prepared to have?