Quality mentoring relationships have a resoundingly positive impact on our young people’s lives. Through MENTOR Indiana, IYI works to advance evidence and research-based mentoring practices, promote quality standards for mentoring, and to expand mentoring programming and opportunities that provide quality mentors and positive experiences for youth.
Why is Mentoring Important?
Young people need to know that someone cares about them. Their daily challenges can often make them feel like they don’t matter. Mentoring changes that. Research shows that a quality mentoring relationship can have a resoundingly positive impact on our young people’s lives. This extends beyond their personal growth and development and extends into their academic and future professional lives. For all its benefits, unfortunately, one in three young people will grow up without ever having a positive mentor.
MENTOR Indiana, the state affiliate of MENTOR: The National Mentoring Partnership, serves as a unifying catalyst for quality youth mentoring programs. By providing the leadership and infrastructure necessary to support the expansion of quality mentoring relationships, MENTOR Indiana is a valuable resource for mentors creating impact.
MENTOR Indiana focuses on:
- Advancing the quality of Indiana’s mentoring field by building relationships with new and existing mentoring programs and providing capacity-building trainings and technical assistance grounded in evidence-based approaches.
- Engaging a wide variety of public and private stakeholders to increase both the number of volunteer mentors as well as resources for the local mentoring field.
- Collecting data on a regular basis to describe the impact of mentoring in the broader community and identify gaps in the range of services needed.
- Expanding public and private support and investment in mentoring through public awareness and advocacy efforts that foster communities that prioritize quality youth mentoring.
MENTOR Indiana, a strategic initiative of Indiana Youth Institute since 2008, empowers youth champions to deliver quality mentoring across the state of Indiana.
Looking for best practice support, tools, resources, and reviews of mentoring research? The National Mentoring Resource Center is the nation’s premier source of training, technical assistance, tools, research summaries, and other information for youth mentoring programs.
Each January, we come together as a community to ignite those passions and help turn those wildest dreams into reality with National Mentoring Month. By harnessing our collective voice, MENTOR advocates for mentorship, legislative priorities, and raises awareness for how one conversation, one experience, and one mentor can change a young person’s life.
MENTOR’s cornerstone publication, the Elements of Effective Practice for Mentoring™, details research-informed and practitioner-approved Standards for creating and sustaining quality youth mentoring programs and consequently, impactful mentoring relationships.
IYI is an affiliate of MENTOR: The National Mentoring Partnership and an official technical assistance provider of the National Mentoring Resource Center, a project of MENTOR and the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention. Disclaimer: The opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this presentation are those of the author/s and do not necessarily reflect those of the Department of Justice.
Mentoring for Youth Affected by the Opioid Crisis and Drug Addiction
Mentoring, when aligned with the Elements of Effective Practice, is an evidence-based tool that can be a key to addressing substance use among youth and their families by helping children develop self-esteem, increase prosocial behaviors, and resist risky behaviors. IYI provides professional development training for adult mentors and technical assistance for mentoring organizations to reduce and prevent youth opioid use and substance use disorder.
The project currently serves hundreds of mentors and mentees annually across Indiana. There is a focus on youth living who live in high and persistent poverty areas, including rural communities and those where the non-fatal opioid overdose rates exceed the statewide rate.
Need more information about the project? Contact Le’Joy (White) Davis.
