Program-wide Mentoring Goals That Reach Every Mentoring Pair

Posted by jmeyer on October 20, 2022

Mentoring goals differ across positive youth development programs. It’s important to identify the mentoring goals of your program as well as the goals for each individual mentee. Find out how to create goals that support each match.

A fundamental desirable outcome of most mentoring programs is to help their mentees reach their goals. Goal-setting discussions and planning can help affect powerful change in youth and in the community. However, to help mentees reach their goals, your program should have some of its own. When mentoring programs articulate their goals, they can do a better job of recruiting young people and volunteers to participate and a better job at retaining mentors and mentees because everyone has a shared understanding and acceptance of the program’s mission and aspirations. These over-arching, program-wide goals can be reflected within the individual goals for each mentoring pair.

Develop goals for your program and mentoring goals

Overall, the primary mission of most mentoring programs is to help and support mentees. In order to implement this mission, there are several steps that would be useful for your organization to consider following. Also, the goals for your program should relate to your program’s mentoring goals or your goals for matches.

  1. Determine the specific area to target with mentees. This is the first step to setting goals for your program. Is your mentoring program geared toward increasing mentees’ interest in STEM, preventing substance misuse, handling trauma, gaining skills for employment, or something else? MENTOR’s Elements of Effective Practice (EEPM), a research-driven guidebook for mentoring, discusses the importance of identifying the over-arching goals of your mentoring program. In fact, our research examined this issue for a specific population of mentees, namely, children with incarcerated parents (COIP). We reported that COIP who were mentored in programs that had specific goals had higher educational expectations than children with incarcerated parents participating in programs that did not have specific goals.
  2. Determine the desired length of your matches. A cornerstone mentoring goal is to determine the desired length of your matches and to communicate that expectation/program requirement clearly to mentors, mentees, and caregivers of mentees. Some mentoring programs are designed to last for one school or calendar year, some are indefinite, and some are in between or shorter. Longer matches have been proven to make a more meaningful impact on mentees. When considering the minimum length of matches, you should also think about how long it will take, on average, to achieve the outcomes that you desire. For example, if your goal is to provide mentees with support during a difficult time in their family’s life (e.g., a parent is incarcerated or recently deceased), then the mentoring program should last long enough to provide support to the young person through their grieving period and not timed to be an additional loss during a vulnerable period in the child’s life.
  3. SMART goals for mentorship programs work best. The SMART acronym provides a useful framework for creating goals that work! Make sure the goals for your program are Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and T By setting realistic and measurable goals, programs are more likely to meet them. For example, a SMART goal may be to have five matches that last at least six months within the next two years of the program. Furthermore, if your program sets the goal for your mentees to do better in school, then this goal is too vague to measure or achieve. What do you mean by “better”? Do you want mentees to do better in all subject areas or in a specific subject? Is that a relevant goal for all mentees in your program, and is it what they want? When do you want this goal to be achieved by? Similarly, if your program encourages each mentor and mentee to set goals for the mentee, mentors will need some help in this process. Both mentors and mentees may benefit from training and support on how to set SMART goals.
  4. Start with a self-assessment. It’s important to know where mentoring programs fall relative to the main benchmarks of the field. Checking where mentoring programs thrive or need improvement is crucial for safety, funding, and results. A mentoring quality improvement plan can help organizations create the most effective and attainable goals for their program operations and practices.

When programs have goals and hold themselves accountable — mentors, and more importantly, mentees, have a positive example of the benefits of setting goals for themselves.

Reaching mentoring goals within individual matches

Mentorship is really about helping the mentee reach and pursue their own goals, not the mentor’s goals. The EEPM includes a benchmark practice directing mentors to identify their mentee’s goals, and then focus on nurturing the interests and goals of their mentee in their relationship.

  1. First, determine the mentee’s goal(s). Are they wanting to have more friends? Are they focused on getting into college or figuring out what to do after they graduate from high school? Once their goals or ambitions are laid out, mentors can help mentees reach their potential. Mentoring Central has designed an entire lesson on how mentors can help their mentees to identify and set goals for themselves in the course titled Building and Maintaining the Relationship.
  2. Second, start with a plan of how the mentee will slowly work toward their desired result. Creating mini-goals is a great idea. Say a mentee wants to work toward becoming financially independent. A mini-goal may be reading a book on finance, opening a checking account, or filling out job applications.
  3. Third, support the mentee and their goals in a positive and constructive way — encouraging the work it takes to achieve the goal and helping them celebrate the end results. Mentors should create relevant and achievable goals for their time with their mentees. This can include helping to provide information, networking, cheerleading, support, or providing resources to help accomplish steps that lead to the mentee’s goal.

The skills that support mentoring goals are most successful when developed through targeted training for mentors. To be effective, it’s important for mentors and program staff to know how to properly prepare and guide mentees.

How to get staff and mentors up to speed

Training is the best way to get everyone ready and in a capable position to support mentees. Many programs use pre-match training or onboarding, such as the courses available on Mentoring Central, to train mentors before they are allowed to meet their mentees. This requirement will allow volunteers to understand what their roles are, how they can help their mentees create and achieve their goals, as well as the appropriate boundaries they need to follow. However, ongoing training, support, and evaluations will help mentors achieve more efficacious results. Staff training provides them with the same vocabulary, information, and skills that are taught to their mentors, so they can be consistent with mentors when providing match support.

Programs are responsible for ensuring staff, mentors, and mentees have the tools they need to create lasting impacts. Without guidelines or training, mentors may follow their own style, however good or bad that may be.

Mentoring Central can help your program reach mentoring goals

Mentoring Central hosts the only research-driven and proven training for mentoring youth. Trusting mentors with impressionable youth and adolescents is an important job that should come with the best training. Our courses are web-based, allowing mentors and staff to take the training from the comfort of their own homes — or wherever they may be. They are walked through real-life scenarios they may encounter and given lessons on goal-setting and achievement, the basis of mentoring. Nearly 100% of mentors who took the training said they felt more confident and ready to mentor and had a better understanding of what mentorship looked like.

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