mass MENTORING
Start a Program
Mass Mentoring Partnership offers training and technical assistance to help organizations develop and sustain high-quality mentoring programs. MMP works with community agencies, educational institutions, youth-serving organizations, workplaces, faith groups and professional associations to provide guidance and resources to create beneficial mentoring relationships for youth and their mentors.

The readiness of an organization to develop a high-quality, responsible mentoring program is built on a solid foundation that includes:
  • Determination that there is a need to be filled
  • Identification of human and financial resources for start-up and on-going operations
  • Assessment of organizational capacity, commitment and capability to provide the structure and consistent monitoring essential to support volunteer mentors and youth
MMP can help your organization determine its readiness to launch the design and planning process for a mentoring program.

Once your organization decides to develop a program, a thoughtful design and planning phase will create the roadmap for your organization to manage, implement and evaluate the mentoring program.

The Elements of Effective Practice outlines a 12-step work plan to ensure a strong structure is in place before the first steps of implementation. The steps are:
  1. Define the youth population that the program will serve.
  2. Identify the types of individuals you will recruit as mentors.
  3. Determine the type of mentoring that the program will offer.
  4. Determine whether your program will be an independent organization or be integrated into another organization.
  5. Define the goals and nature of the mentoring sessions.
  6. Determine the types of outcomes to be achieved for all of the participants - youth, mentors and sponsoring organization(s).
  7. Determine when the mentoring will take place.
  8. Determine the frequency and duration the mentoring matches will endure.
  9. Decide where mentoring matches will primarily meet.
  10. Identify your program stakeholders and how to promote awareness of your program.
  11. Decide how to evaluate program success.
  12. Establish a match-monitoring and management procedure to assure the safety and success of the mentoring relationships in your program.
Mass Mentoring Partnership’s Mentoring A-Z workshop provides an overview of these steps to developing and maintaining a high-quality mentoring program based on the nationally recognized best practices outlined in the Elements of Effective Practice.

Other links you may find useful:

The MENTORS Web site has extensive information on Designing and Planning a program as well as a link to the Elements of Effective Practice toolkit. Click here to get more information.