“Best Practice” in Mentoring Programs: Evidence, Community Voice, and What works in Mentoring Programs
January 13, 2025
Over the years MENTOR has worked to blend practitioner (programmatic) and community wisdom with the best practices that are emerging from mentoring research. Our new 5th edition of the Elements of Effective Practice for Mentoring™ (EEPM) does exactly that, combining a wealth of research evidence with the preferences, values, and perspectives of master practitioners who have led successful mentoring programs.
MENTOR’s research team reviewed several hundred peer-reviewed journal articles and independent evaluations of mentoring programs before putting together the recommendations in this new edition of the EEPM. These studies often highlight things program staff did in creating mentoring relationships that had an impact on the young people they serve. A few of these studies actually test specific practices, attempting to identify the very best ways to do aspects of this work. Other studies evaluate efforts to intentionally improve program practice, to illustrate that programs can improve what they do and how they do it over time.
One of the most important things that MENTOR has done across its 35-year history is help educate professionals in youth-serving organizations about how to build, maintain, and continuously improve mentoring programs in a variety of school and community settings. When MENTOR first started in 1990, the field of youth mentoring was still emerging. Well-known organizations like Big Brothers Big Sisters of America had been around for about 100 years at that point, but as the concept of mentoring grew in popularity, service providers of all types were rapidly inventing new mentoring programs and models.
There was little consensus as to how professionals could make these programs safe, effective, and sustainable over time. There was lots in limbo, creating a “wild west” within the mentoring field that I saw firsthand when I first started doing mentoring work in 1998.
MENTOR recognized that the mentoring field could only prosper and achieve its goals if we bolstered the quality of all the mentoring programs that were proliferating nationwide. While our work has always strived to increase the quantity of mentoring, increasingly MENTOR’s efforts have also focused on quality. We want to help mentoring professionals do their work better and to support them in building strong programs that are grounded in “best practices.”
But how are those best practices for mentoring identified? How do we know which ways of training mentors or supervising mentor-mentee relationships, for example, are more effective than others?
Well, much of this guidance has come from the world of mentoring research. Scholars have been studying mentoring relationships for a long time, but many have also studied program design and delivery, seeking to understand the mechanics of how a good mentoring program operates.
The hope in this research is that studying the things that program staff do to create, prepare, support, and transition mentoring relationships can help us identify key practices or ways of doing things that can be replicated by others, strengthening the delivery of mentoring to youth, families, and volunteers by figuring out “what works” when mentoring is provided in a programmatic context.
We know research is only one way of determining what “works” in a mentoring program. We also recognize that the wisdom and professional experience of practitioners, those who work in programs, also plays a key role. Mentoring professionals understand the people and communities they serve intimately, and sometimes a program practice recommended by research doesn’t quite fit or align with how mentoring should be delivered in a particular setting or context. The preferences of youth, families, and volunteers also matters a great deal when thinking about “best practice” — after all, what a research study suggests will be effective won’t matter if the people doing the mentoring don’t find it helpful.
I recently authored a brief paper that highlights some of this research from over the last three decades. While this doesn’t mention all those hundreds of research papers directly, it does provide a nice overview of some of the seminal studies of mentoring program practice to date, as well as research on efforts to improve the quality of mentoring programs over time (including some of MENTOR’s own work on that front).
This white paper will be of interest to anyone who wants to learn a bit more about how research has informed what we consider to be “best practice” in mentoring program delivery. It provides a summary of how we got to our current moment within mentoring and how all of our mentoring programs can keep improving over time as we learn more about how to get impactful mentoring to the youth who need it. It may even be helpful in providing assistance with grant writing and fundraising efforts, as it demonstrates the strong connection between the actions of program staff and the outcomes that youth receive from their mentoring experiences.
This new edition of the EEPM makes it clear that mentoring should not be delivered in cookie cutter programming that is detached from the values, needs, and preferences of any community. However, we do know a lot about what a quality mentoring program looks like and the things program staff should be doing to deliver a quality mentoring service. This new edition attempts to ground our field in evidence-based practices while also allowing practitioners the flexibility they need to offer programming that meets their community’s needs.
We encourage everyone within the mentoring movement to become familiar with the effective practices identified by research and approved by practitioners doing the programmatic work on the ground.
To learn more please visit eepm.mentoring.org. You can also access the full white paper here.