Mentoring youth in foster care

The 2011 Northeast Regional Mentoring Conference, Oct. 13-14 in Framingham, MA, will bring together more than 250 practitioners, researchers and other stakeholders in the mentoring field. The conference’s numerous workshops, covering various themes, will ultimately connect the outcomes and power of mentoring.

Over the next few weeks, we’ll be highlighting the conference with previews to some of the workshops. This post is courtesy of Adoption and Foster Care (AFC) Mentoring’s Executive Director Colby Berger and Program Director Melissa Chu, conference presenters.

At first glance, youth in foster care represent a population that arguably most needs and could most benefit from mentoring. Frequent transitions in living situation force youth in care to continually sever important connections and relationships.

Adoption and Foster Care (AFC) Mentoring believes that providing a consistent, caring adult mentor can positively impact the world of a youth in foster care.

While more mentoring programs are now serving youth in care, offering population-specific programs remains a challenge. Too many well-intentioned mentoring programs fail to recognize that young people in foster care have different needs than their peers, and unknowingly use a one-size-fits-all mentoring model which has the potential to do more harm than good for foster youth.

Melissa Chu and Colby Berger, AFC Mentoring

This workshop will focus on the unique strengths and challenges faced by young people in foster care and work with participants to identify and enact the types of mentoring practices that can help foster youth to flourish.

Participants in this workshop, whether or not they are directly serving foster youth, can benefit by gaining insight and understanding to the needs of special populations. The workshop will use interactive methods to teach the risks that “best practices” can sometimes add to mentoring with targeted populations, and specifically to youth in care.

Applying best practices correctly could be the difference between creating a positive impact and adding unnecessary harm in the life of a foster youth. Discussion, activities, and video will allow participants to actively engage in assessing their organization’s ability to serve this population or refer youth to programs more specifically addressing their needs.

Foster and adopted youth are in special need of mentors; a committed adult can provide the support and stabilization so needed in a life of transition.

However, the benefit of such a program lies in tailoring training and practice to the needs of these youth. This session will utilize lessons from the field to offer insight to mentoring programs of all kinds. Through this inviting and engaging workshop, we hope to provide the tools which will allow organizations to provide careful and intentional mentoring to foster youth.

Join us at the Northeast Regional Mentoring Conference; let’s team up to better serve youth in care!

It’s not that easy being green

The 2011 Northeast Regional Mentoring Conference, Oct. 13-14 in Framingham, MA, will bring together more than 250 practitioners, researchers and other stakeholders in the mentoring field. The conference’s numerous workshops, covering various themes, will ultimately connect the outcomes and power of mentoring.

Over the next few weeks, we’ll be highlighting the conference with previews to some of the workshops. This post is courtesy of presenter Carolyn Martino.

I am a professional storyteller, and I was born with a large birthmark on my right cheek. Growing up I suffered the slings and arrows of the outrageous fortune of being different. But my journey – this wonderful, difficult, tragic, comic trek we call life – has led me from feelings of inferiority to a true appreciation of my own uniqueness.

I recently saw the movie, Music Within. The title comes from a quote by Oliver Wendell Holmes:

“A few can touch the magic string, and noisy fame is proud to win them:
Alas for those that never sing, but die with all their music in them!”

The movie is based on the true story of Richard Pimentel, a man who played a pivotal role in creating the Americans with Disabilities Act. Deafened by a bomb blast in Vietnam, Richard returns home to discover his life’s calling: helping others with disabilities, including his fellow veterans.

Along with his best friend Art Honneyman, wheel-chair bound with cerebral palsy and almost undecipherable speech (Richard calls him “the smartest and funniest man I have ever known”), Richard fights for the rights of those whose voices can’t always be heard.

In one harrowing – and at the same time, hilarious – scene, Richard takes Art to an all-night restaurant for pancakes to celebrate his birthday. After his tortuous struggle to get the wheelchair up a flight of stairs, the waitress refuses to serve them, calling Art “the ugliest, most disgusting thing” she has ever seen. “People like you should have been killed at birth.” When they refuse to leave, the police arrest them under the “Ugly Law,” a statute that prohibited public appearances of people who were “unsightly.”

It’s like the joke Abraham Lincoln told about himself. While riding in the woods one day, he stopped to let a woman, also on horseback, cross the path. She stopped, horrified, and said, “I do believe you are the ugliest man I ever saw.” “Madam,” he replied, “you are probably right, but I can’t help it!” “No,” she said, “you can’t help it, but you might have the decency to stay at home!”

Richard Pimentel’s mission was not so much about changing others’ perceptions of people with disabilities as it was about altering their own perceptions of themselves. With Art’s help, he does that. And in helping others discover their hidden music, Richard discovered his own.

In my workshop, I will present MASKS, an autobiographical piece which chronicles my own journey. It’s in two acts. Back in 1990, living in New York City, before I even heard of storytelling, I was moved by the intimate nature of performance art to write the first act. I was learning to speak from a place of deeper connection with my real self, and I thought people might be interested in hearing about my childhood with a birthmark and my decision as a teenager to wear a thick make-up to cover it up. They were interested.

It has taken me over 20 years to write – to live – the second act. There are many needs for art, and perhaps the greatest is to mirror our own lives. Growing up different – and this is also true also of the gay and lesbian population – you never see yourself reflected in the media, and you begin to feel that something truly is wrong. Invisible, a ghost nobody, not even yourself, talks about. There’s a profound sense of isolation. I’ve learned that when we are allowed to talk about our differences, we prove our existence and we discover our own humanity.

That happened to me with MASKS, and it has happened with many members of the audience as well.

It is my hope that this performance/workshop will give you a greater insight and sensitivity into the internal struggles and self-limiting beliefs of your targeted populations — people who for one reason or another feel out of the mainstream, isolated and alone, and who find it difficult to talk about their feelings.

There will be a chance after the performance to discuss ways in which you might use your insights to have a greater impact on those you serve.

Promoting goal management skills through mentoring programs

The 2011 Northeast Regional Mentoring Conference, Oct. 13-14 in Framingham, MA, will bring together more than 250 practitioners, researchers and other stakeholders in the mentoring field. The conference’s numerous workshops, covering various themes, will ultimately connect the outcomes and power of mentoring.

Over the next few weeks, we’ll be highlighting the conference with previews to some of the workshops. This post is courtesy of Mimi Arbeit, Ph.D. student at Tufts. She is a part of a team of researchers at Tufts, led by Dr. Edmond Bowers, that have developed a goal management system called Project GPS, which will be presented by Dr. Bowers at the conference.

Every day, youth in mentoring programs are setting goals, working to reach those goals, and regrouping in the face of challenges. Whether it’s earning an A in biology, making the marching band, applying to colleges, or learning how to cook something other than grilled cheese, talking about goals is an important part of any mentoring relationship.

Research from around the world has indicated that youth with strong goals and strong goal-directed behaviors exhibit the most positive development and the least negative outcomes. However, there are not many research-based tools out there to help mentors build and measure these critical life skills in young people.

Over the past two years, Dr. Ed Bowers has directed our team of researchers at Tufts University in working to fill that gap. We designed a set of tools that make talking about – and eventually achieving – goals through a mentoring relationship easier, more fun, and more effective in promoting youth’s positive development. We call this system Project GPS, and we’ve based it on the most cutting-edge research on youth development as well as feedback from youth-serving professionals from around the country.

Project GPS includes a comprehensive series of quick and easy measurement tools, known as rubrics. There are also nearly 30 fun activities, inspirational videos of young people talking about goal achievement, and much more.

Project GPS "road map" visual

We will be presenting Project GPS at our workshop at the Northeast Regional Mentoring Conference. Our workshop will add to the knowledge of the mentoring field by teaching participants about the structure and function of goal-management skills in youth, introducing tools for teaching and practicing goal-management skills through a mentoring relationship, and explaining how these tools can be used to measure and maximize the impact of mentoring programs on the development of goal-management skills and youth.

Our session will introduce these tools using interactive activities and we will discuss different options for implementing these tools in a variety of mentoring contexts.

To find out more about Project GPS and how you can promote goal management skills in the youth in your program, email Mimi Arbeit at tuftsgps@gmail.com or come to our workshop at the Northeast Regional Mentoring Conference.

Project GPS is a project of the Institute for Applied Research in Youth Development, directed by Dr. Richard Lerner.

Evaluation of a strengths-based youth mentoring program

The 2011 Northeast Regional Mentoring Conference, Oct. 13-14 in Framingham, MA, will bring together more than 250 practitioners, researchers, and other stakeholders in the mentoring field. The conference’s numerous workshops, covering various themes, will ultimately connect the outcomes and power of mentoring.

Over the next few weeks, we’ll be highlighting the conference with previews to some of the workshops. This post is courtesy of presenter Bernice Conklin-Powers, Psy.D., assistant professor of social and behavioral sciences at the University of Southern Maine Lewiston Auburn College.

The Mentoring Research Collaborative is a team of researchers from the University of New England and the University of Southern Maine. The collaboration was formed to evaluate the outcome of a three-year Office of Juvenile Justice Programs grant that was awarded to promote college-based youth mentoring programs across Maine.

The researchers were tasked to answer the question, “Does mentoring help to strengthen and improve the developmental outcomes for youth engaged in mentoring relationships?”

We look forward to sharing the findings of our three-year research project on Oct. 14 at the 2011 Northeast Regional Mentoring Conference. Following is a summary of the key highlights of our presentation, Evaluation of a strengths-based youth mentoring program: Historical and theoretical perspectives, empirical results, and policy implications.

While the team set about attempting to answer the question above, many more questions arose. The first and most basic question encountered was, “What is mentoring exactly?” Sam McReynolds, Ph.D., (UNE) will attempt to address this question by providing a synopsis of the different ways that mentoring has been defined over time.

A second question that arose was, “What are we measuring exactly and are we effectively measuring it?” Bernice Conklin-Powers, Psy.D., (USM LAC) will discuss the emerging field of strengths-based assessment and will review the strengths and limitations of this approach.

Maryann Corsello, Ph.D., (UNE) will provide a synthesis of the answer to “Did mentoring work?” Specifically, she will address the impact school performance indicators of the youth who participated in the mentoring programs.

Finally, Bruce Thomspon, Ph.D., (USM) will discuss the complexities encountered when attempting to answer, “Did mentoring work equally for everyone?” His focus will be on youth from different socioeconomic backgrounds.

Empowering the faith community for youth mentoring: guidelines to implement and sustain quality programs

The 2011 Northeast Regional Mentoring Conference, Oct. 13-14 in Framingham, MA, will bring together more than 250 practitioners, researchers, and other stakeholders in the mentoring field. The conference’s numerous workshops, covering various themes, will ultimately connect the outcomes and power of mentoring.

Over the next few weeks, we’ll be highlighting the conference with previews to some of the workshops. This post is courtesy of presenter Clara Giles Carter, Ed. D, president of Management Consultant Services, LLC.

Many young people are faced with devastating social ills that doom them to failure. Often, many of these children cannot break free from the poverty, crime, abuse or neglect that are a part of their every day lives.

Traditionally, churches of various denominations have been the “safe haven” for the community, providing family support services. Historically the church has played an integral part in a child’s development, by demonstrating their commitment to address a wide range of social problems through special ministries.

Without attention from the church, many times, these unmet issues have been the root of a child’s personal and educational failure. The constituency has tremendous leadership skills, enthusiasm and creativity in nurturing families, and protecting them from forces that would weaken or destroy the family unit. Research supports that the church and its congregation are ideal to instilling the type of spiritually based morals and values necessary for a child’s growth, and strengthening his/her connection to “mainstream” society mentoring.

Today, more and more congregations are reaching out to their communities with ministries to include mentoring to address the wide range of social problems that youth encounter. With their tradition of instilling spiritual values and moral strength, churches are especially equipped to develop and support mentoring programs. The deep roots of faith ministries in the community can provide access to motivated volunteers to serve as mentors and attract young people who are in need of positive adult role models.

For the Northeast Regional Mentoring Conference attendees interested in implementing mentoring ministries, this workshop will highlight the faith-based institution as a vehicle for an innovative mentoring model. Presented in a “how-to” approach, the material presented will be adopted from the Elements of Effective Practice for Mentoring.

Additionally, for those religious leaders in need of tips to strengthen existing programs, the workshop will offer lessons learned, best practices and program guidelines that have proven success from established faith-based programs. The presenter, the former director of training at Maryland Mentoring Partnership, will share firsthand knowledge from her work with successful faith-based programs in Maryland.