How Mentoring Central Can Help Your Program Meet Standards in the Elements of Effective Practice for Mentoring™ (EEPM): Part 1

Posted by eporter on April 14, 2025

MENTOR’s Elements of Effective Practice for Mentoring™ (EEPM) is a guidebook for mentoring programs that outlines standards of practice that are proven by research to have positive impacts on mentoring relationships or mentees. By following the standards outlined in the EEPM, mentoring programs can ensure that they are positively impacting the lives of youth and may increase their chances of receiving funding to support their program.

Mentoring Central offers products and services for mentoring programs that are carefully and strategically designed to align with the standards in the EEPM to help programs reach their highest potential. In fact, Mentoring Central researchers have contributed to the development of many editions of the EEPM and served on the Working Group that designed and wrote the latest (fifth) edition. Therefore, our team is well positioned to develop and offer mentoring resources that align with the EEPM, are based in evidence, and elevate mentoring programs.

Tamara Veit, Executive Director for Surry/Stokes Friends of Youth, said that Mentoring Central’s Annual Membership Program helps their mentoring program meet EEPM standards:

“I would highly recommend Mentoring Central’s trainings to a new program. I believe that practicing the enhanced [elements of effective practice] provides the best quality, and the [Mentoring Central] training courses provide a simple-to-understand template for programs who are not sure where they’re going yet.”

How You Can Meet the EEPM, Fifth Edition Standards with Mentoring Central

  1. Standard of Practice 1: “All mentoring programs should consider the values, principles, and ethics that inform their program design and delivery, and codify them into the program’s mission statement and a formal values statement, as well as in program policy.”

Mentoring Central’s Orientation to Your Mentoring Program toolkit helps your program provide a solid orientation experience for new mentors that outlines the policies, requirements, mission, and values of your specific mentoring program to help you ensure that everyone participating in your mentoring program is on the same page. Conducting the orientation can help your program ensure that your values, principles, and ethics are upheld in your everyday practices, including in mentors’ interactions with mentees. In addition, preparing the orientation content and materials to conduct the orientation provides a convenient opportunity for your staff to evaluate or reevaluate your program’s mission statement and principles to incorporate into various aspects of your program to meet the first standard of the EEPM.

  1. Standard of Practice 2: “All mentoring programs should design their services based on careful consideration of youth strengths, needs, available resources, and a theory of change that describes how the program’s mentoring experiences can help youth achieve meaningful progress on relevant outcomes. This program design should be codified through written documents that include a mission statement, a vision statement, a logic model and theory of change, and a policy and procedures manual.”

Mentoring Central offers consultation services for new and well-established mentoring programs to help develop and refine your program model and services. These consultation services are tailored to the unique needs of your program. We have experience working with mentoring programs to develop their theory of change and logic model to include in grant proposals.

  1. Standard of Practice 3: “Program recruits an appropriate number of eligible youth by implementing a formal recruitment plan.”

By utilizing Mentoring Central’s consultation services, your program can gain a better understanding of the groups of youth your program is best able to serve and the outcomes you successfully promote in mentees. This knowledge can help your program craft a strategic, effective mentee recruitment plan that reaches the youth your program is best suited to serve.

  1. Standard of Practice 4: “Program recruits a diverse pool of appropriate mentors (either volunteers or paid staff mentors), in sufficient numbers, by implementing a formal recruitment plan.”

Mentoring Central can also evaluate your current strategy for recruiting mentors and help you find ways to improve your plan to recruit enough mentors for your program that have the qualities needed to optimally serve mentees involved in your program.

  1. Standard of Practice 5: “Programs should have processes for welcoming youth into the program that ensure prospective participants are eligible and a good fit in terms of their goals and commitment to engage in the mentoring relationship and program activities.”

The Mentoring Central website is powered by a software platform, called eTrove, that supports all phases of the mentoring process from application, through enrollment, onboarding, training, and culminating in match closure. eTrove is both a project management and learning management software (LMS) system, and it can be customized for the application and screening process for matches. For example, eTrove can be used to collect applications from prospective mentees, and then, review of applications can be assigned to a staff member for follow-up. This customization feature can be used to meet the fifth standard of the EEPM.

  1. Standard of Practice 6: “Programs should implement a mentor screening and enrollment process that determines all mentors are both safe and suitable for the program experience prior to being formally accepted and placed in a mentoring role.”

Programs can customize eTrove to collect applications and/or questionnaires from volunteer mentors, which may make it easier for programs to check if volunteers are safe and suitable for mentoring in their program, as well as to meet the sixth standard of the EEPM. Programs can customize the background and demographic questions in the online application, as well as include questionnaires with rating scales or open-ended questions. Mentoring Central’s team can consult on designing your application to include state-of-the-art questions that assess mentors’ thoughts and feelings about youth (e.g., having positive attitudes about youth), themselves (e.g., their personality traits; their readiness to begin mentoring and feelings of self-efficacy), and mentoring (e.g., their goals for their mentoring relationship) to assess their safety and readiness to mentor.

To learn more about Mentoring Central’s evaluation services, read our new article linked here. If you are interested in utilizing Mentoring Central’s consultation services in order to meet the standards in the fifth edition of the EEPM, contact us for a consultation at MentoringCentral@irtinc.us.

Stay tuned to see how Mentoring Central can help you meet even more standards of practice in the fifth edition of the EEPM! If you have not already subscribed to our newsletter, complete the form linked here, so you can receive our second blog in this two-part series.

 

Herrera, C., Garringer, M., & Bennett, R. (2025). Elements of effective practice for mentoring, 5th edition. Boston, MA: MENTOR.