Posted by eporter on November 25, 2025
Mentoring Central is honored to continue our collaboration with the Oklahoma Commission on Children and Youth (OCCY) to provide high-quality mentoring trainings and services to mentoring programs across Oklahoma.
Mentoring Central began collaborating with the OCCY in 2024 to support their efforts to train and effectively prepare mentors to create relationships with mentees with unique experiences and needs. There are many organizations throughout Oklahoma that are supported, in part, by OCCY serving youth impacted by parental incarceration, youth involved in the juvenile justice system, and youth in foster care. Mentors who are supporting these populations of mentees need high-quality training on a variety of mentoring topics to form close, long-lasting, impactful relationships with their mentees. For this reason, the OCCY became a member of Mentoring Central and implemented several of our trainings in mentoring programs across the state.
After consulting with the OCCY to determine the services and trainings that would be most beneficial to the Oklahoma programs, Mentoring Central created an automated process to enroll new mentors in participating programs in our trainings. Mentoring Central also hosted webinars to help programs become familiar with our trainings and software.
Mentoring Central deployed custom surveys and collected data from the programs to get feedback regarding how the web-based and instructor-led trainings impacted mentors’ and staff members’ knowledge about mentoring topics, confidence in their mentoring abilities, and satisfaction with the trainings. The feedback showed that mentors and staff were highly satisfied with the training, very likely to recommend it, and found it very useful and easy to complete. In addition, after completing Mentoring Central’s core mentor training series, mentors and staff in Oklahoma programs reported feeling more ready to mentor, having more realistic expectations for the mentoring relationship, and experiencing greater self-efficacy for mentoring. These findings suggest that Mentoring Central’s trainings may promote positive outcomes for mentoring programs serving special populations of youth.
Projects like these not only allow Mentoring Central to support mentoring programs serving special populations of youth but also enables us to examine the impact of our trainings and continuously refine them to maximize positive outcomes for matches. If you are interested in partnering with Mentoring Central to receive high-quality mentoring services and trainings tailored to your program’s unique needs, contact us at MentoringCentral@irtinc.us.