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Achieving high quality and long‐lasting matches in youth mentoring programmes: a case study of 4 R esults mentoring
Author(s) -
Higley Elizabeth,
Walker Sarah C.,
Bishop Asia S.,
Fritz Cindy
Publication year - 2016
Publication title -
child and family social work
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.912
H-Index - 57
eISSN - 1365-2206
pISSN - 1356-7500
DOI - 10.1111/cfs.12141
Subject(s) - positive youth development , context (archaeology) , psychology , mental health , quality (philosophy) , medical education , applied psychology , developmental psychology , medicine , psychiatry , geography , philosophy , archaeology , epistemology
Mentoring programmes show significant promise for enhancing the well‐being of youth with complex needs. Research indicates that high quality mentoring, although difficult to achieve, positively impacts youth development across behavioural, social, emotional and academic domains. The difficulty of sustaining long‐term matches between mentors and youth, however, remains an important concern for the field of mentoring, as foreshortened matches can be harmful to youth. The 4 R esults mentoring programme has been identified as a P romising P ractice through the W ashington S tate I nventory of child‐serving behavioural and mental health programmes and has developed a unique infrastructure to support critical programme values such as match longevity. In 7 years, the programme has successfully retained 98% of mentors for at least 1 year with an average match length of 3.7 years. The following article describes the programme's guiding philosophy and approach to recruiting and training mentors in the context of existing best practices research.