Positive youth development research has long demonstrated that youth benefit from close, caring relationships with adults who serve as positive role models. Today, 8.5 million youth continue to lack supportive, sustained relationships with caring adults. Mentoring - which matches youth with responsible, caring mentors, usually adults - has been growing in popularity as both a prevention and intervention strategy over the past decades.
Mentoring provides youth with mentors who can develop an emotional bond with the mentee, have greater experience than the mentee, and can provide support, guidance, and opportunities to help youth succeed in life and meet their goals. Mentoring relationships can be formal or informal with substantial variation, but the essential components include creating caring, empathetic, consistent, and long-lasting relationships, often with some combination of role modeling, teaching, and advising.
Foundation and philanthropic support for mentoring programs from around the Web.
One of the most significant challenges to social entrepreneurship and innovation is ensuring a diversity of approaches and participants in the movement. To truly deliver meaningful social change the leaders of the effort must share perspectives of the challenges faced by communities across the U.S. that can most appropriately come from members of those communities. Ashoka, through its All America initiative seeks to increase the diversity of social entrepreneurship practitioners.