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From Treatment to Empowerment: New Approaches to Youth Mentoring
Author(s) -
Schwartz Sarah E.O.,
Rhodes Jean E.
Publication year - 2016
Publication title -
american journal of community psychology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.113
H-Index - 112
eISSN - 1573-2770
pISSN - 0091-0562
DOI - 10.1002/ajcp.12070
Subject(s) - empowerment , health psychology , positive youth development , psychological intervention , psychology , youth empowerment , scope (computer science) , field (mathematics) , public relations , social psychology , public health , developmental psychology , political science , nursing , medicine , mathematics , psychiatry , computer science , pure mathematics , law , programming language
Traditional approaches to formal youth mentoring have focused primarily on improving the lives of “at‐risk” youth through the assignment of individual mentors who are typically disconnected from youth's communities. Similarly, research in the field of formal mentoring has emphasized the dyadic relationship between the mentor and the mentee, with less attention paid to the broader relational contexts in which such relationships unfold. The current paper proposes a new framework that expands the scope of mentoring interventions to include approaches that build on and cultivate informal supports and empower youth to identify and reach out to networks of potential supportive adults, thus increasing the reach of youth mentoring.