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.
Source: youth.gov
Foundation and philanthropic support for mentoring programs from around the Web.
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Caroline Diehl is a serial social entrepreneur in the impact media space. She is Executive Chair and Founder of the UK’s only charitable and co-operatively owned national broadcast television channel Together TV, the leading broadcaster for social change runs a national TV channel in the UK and digital platform which helps people find inspiration to do good in their lives and communities.