Mentoring System Involved Youth

Bernstein, N. (2005). Helping those who need it most: Meeting the mental health care needs of youth in the foster care and juvenile justice systems. Sacramento: California Family Impact Seminar. http://www.library.ca.gov/crb/05/04/05-004.pdf
Young people who are transitioning out of the foster care and juvenile justice systems often have serious mental health needs. This report explores these questions and proposes some answers from young people who have experienced the systems from the inside. It also highlights case studies of some innovative programs, and profiles youth and practitioners. The programs include: The First Place Fund for Youth, The Mentoring Center, and A Home Within. The report concludes with some overall lessons drawn from the experiences of young people.

Best practice guidelines for foster care youth mentoring (2005). New York City Administration for Children's Services.
http://www.nyc.gov/html/acs/html/become_mentor/best_practices_addition.shtml
This guide discusses best practices for mentoring youth in foster care. These include building organizational capacity, working with mentors, assisting mentees, and working with case workers to demonstrate the importance of mentoring, and ensure that it is one of the services that can be provided to a foster care youth.

Orphan Foundation of America: E-Mentoring.
www.vmentor.com
The Orphan Foundation of America (OFA) is demonstrating how “ementoring” can work under a three-year grant from Northrop Grumman Foundation. The site primarily serves to establish relationships between adult volunteers and foster youth living in remote locations, but it can also augment communications for adult/youth pairs who cannot meet face-to-face as often as they would like.

Child Welfare League. Child Welfare: Family Foster Care: Fostering Healthy Connections through Peer Mentoring.
http://www.cwla.org/programs/fostercare/peermentoring.htm
The Child Welfare League of America, in collaboration with FosterClub, a nonprofit national support network for foster youth, seeks to increase healthy connections and create social support networks for young people in foster care through a unique peer mentoring program that may serve as a model for replication. The first phase of this project is expected to be completed in December 2006.

Corporation for National and Community Service. Mentoring Children in Foster Care: Considerations and Partnership Strategies for Senior Corps Directors.
http://www.nationalserviceresources.org/sites/learns/resources/seniorcorps/products/ Mentoring_Children_in_Foster_Care_Final_Revised.pdf
This toolkit is designed to help Senior Corps directors recruit, train, and place volunteers in mentoring programs serving foster youth. It can also help identify and establish productive partnerships with mentoring programs and other agencies that are part of the foster care system. Well-coordinated services between Senior Corps and other partners will increase the positive impacts of mentoring, enabling children to cope better with their circumstances and transition more successfully into adulthood.

‘Foster care’ for both parent and child can help many families stay together. (2004). Child Pretection Law Report, 30(14), 107.
The “shared family care” (SFC) approach differs from the usual foster care process. Instead of having an abused or neglected child enter foster care, in SFC the child, siblings and parents all go to live with a mentoring family. Although this model has been slow to catch on nationally, those in the program reap some significant benefits that are not found in traditional foster care programs. Re-entry rates and the duration of foster care placements are significantly lower than typical foster care services, as parents who graduated from SFC with their families intact said they picked up skills that they could not have acquired from the classroom. However, the program is difficult to run due to funding constraints.

It's my life: A framework for youth transitioning from foster care to successful adulthood. (2001). Casey Family Services.
http://www.casey.org/NR/rdonlyres/5FC52E1E-CCCB-42FC-B9D6- 6E6D008446D5/678/
casey_its_my_life_book.pdf.
Casey’s strategic plan for the new century outlines a clear strategy to reach more young people in transition: “Each year, more than 20,000 American foster youth turn 18 and step out into the world alone, most of them without resources. Casey has created a national plan to develop more services for youth who “age out” of the foster care system. Working with other public and private agencies, we will help ensure that foster care transition services are available in every state, drawing from all available resources at the local, state, and national levels. Casey’s transition services are designed to provide young adults with the skills, knowledge and supports they need to become self-supporting by age 25. Through relationships with family, friends, and community, we want to make certain that they will have the resources necessary to succeed in all the important areas - or “domains” - of their lives: identity formation, community connections and supportive relationships, physical and mental health, life skills, education, employment, and housing. Each of these domains is discussed in detail in the pages that follow.

Mech, E. V., Pryde, J. A., & Rycraft, J. R. (1995). Mentors for adolescents in foster care. Child & Adolescent Social Work Journal, 12(4), 317-328.
The authors surveyed 29 child welfare programs and found that mentor programs for adolescents in foster care tended to fall into several categories: transitional life skills; cultural empowerment; corporate/business; programs for young parents; and group homes with mentors. They concluded that mentoring has the potential to connect youth in foster care with a cross-section of caring adults who can provide a bridge to higher education and employment.

MENTOR. Fostering positive outcomes: How mentoring can help children and adolescents in foster care. http://www.mentoring.org/program_staff/research_corner/ fostering_positive_outcomes.php?pid=all
Mentoring programs are part of a more comprehensive approach that is needed in order to coordinate service delivery and engage the community in promoting optimal development of youth in foster care. This comprehensive approach includes efforts to prevent child abuse and neglect, and to increase the availability of high-quality professional intervention within a well-coordinated system of care.

Mentoring children in foster care: Considerations and partnership strategies for Senior Corps Directors (2004). The Mentoring Center.
http://www.nationalserviceresources.org/sites/learns/resources/seniorcorps
/products/ Mentoring_Children_in_Foster_Care_Final_Revised.pdf
This toolkit is designed to help Senior Corps directors recruit, train, and place volunteers in mentoring programs serving foster youth. It can also help you identify and establish productive partnerships with mentoring programs and other agencies that are part of the foster care system. Well-coordinated services between Senior Corps and other partners will increase the positive impacts of mentoring, enabling children to cope better with their circumstances and transition more successfully into adulthood.

North, D., & Ingram, B. (2003). Foster youth mentorship training for program managers. Evaluation, Management, Training.
http://www.emt.org/userfiles/FosterYouthSeries5.pdf
California has the largest population of foster youth in the world. These youth are an extremely high-risk population and require special attention to help them transition into safe and nurturing environments. The Mentoring Plus Workshop Series addresses topics most critical to effective mentoring programs. The goal of these workshops is to assist new and existing mentoring programs in providing children and youth with the best mentoring practices available.

Promising practices: School to career and post secondary education for foster care youth. Workforce Strategy Center.
This report identifies current best practices and programs in preparing foster care programs, examines notable models outside the system, and develops key principles and recommendations. Mentoring is one component of the report’s recommendations. National experience shows that connection with a caring adult is one of the most effective interventions in youth programming.

Rhodes, J. E., Haight, W. L., & Briggs, E. C., (2000). The influence of mentoring on the peer relationships of foster youth in relative and non-relative care. Journal of Research on Adolescence, 9(2), 185-201.
The influence of a mentoring program (Big Brothers / Big Sisters) on the peer relationships of foster youth in relative and non-relative care was examined. Youth were randomly assigned to either the treatment or control condition, and changes in their peer relationships were assessed after 18 months. Foster parents were more likely than non-foster parents to report that their child showed improved social skills, as well as greater comfort and trust interacting with others, as a result of the intervention. In addition, whereas the peer relationships of all non-foster youth (N=90) remained stable, treatment foster youth (N=90) reported improvements in pro-social and self-esteem enhancing support, and control foster youth showed decrements over time. When the foster youth were differentiated further on the basis of their placement, a pattern of findings emerged in which treatment youth in relative foster care reported slight improvements in pro-social support, whereas treatment youth in non-relative foster care reported slight declines. All foster you in the control group reported decrements in peer support over time, with non-relative foster youth reporting the sharpest declines. Implications for research and intervention are discussed.

Yancey, A. K. (1998). Building positive self-image in adolescents in foster care: The use of role models in an interactive group approach, Adolescence, 33(130).
The article describes the development of a pilot preventive mental health intervention, the PRIDE (personal and Racial/ethnic Identity Development and Enhancement) program, designed to provide components of parenting that are necessary for promoting positive self-image in ethnically marginalized adolescents and that are typically lacking in the group foster care milieu. PRIDE utilizes successful, ethnically relevant role models in interactive group sessions to create a significant cognitive and emotional experience for teens. While the utility of role modeling for at-risk youth is widely accepted, there is little research on the packaging, delivery, and influence of this intervention modality. This study demonstrates the feasibility of a “hybrid” role-modeling approach (intermediate in intensity of exposure and cost between one-to-one mentoring and career-day programs). Implications for further research on this type of intervention are discussed.