Mass Mentoring

Quality-based Membership Initiative

What is a "Quality-based Membership Initiative"?
In its final form, the MMP initiative will implement a statewide membership that helps to ensure excellence and quality expansion in the youth mentoring field. It will be designed to:

Offer a meaningful "indicator of quality" based on the nationally recognized Elements of Effective Practice for youth mentoring programs to benchmark their program practices and outcomes, and to leverage for marketing, recruitment and funding purposes;

Increase MMP and the field’s ability to attract more resources and funding;

Further expand and broaden MMP’s capacity-building services for programs;

Offer a more substantial, systematic and defined relationship between MMP and mentoring programs in its network; and

Strengthen overall service delivery in the mentoring field across the state.

How did the idea for this initiative come about?

Much of the original impetus for this current ground-breaking initiative came directly from mentoring programs in our network that had been searching for tangible ways to be recognized for the quality work they were doing.

Program feedback, combined with 2006 research by Jean Rhodes showing the direct correlation between quality mentoring and positive outcomes for youth, motivated MMP to conduct its own research on the feasibility of a membership initiative, and then seek seed funding.

Armed with results from focused research by a New Sector Fellow, a set of already well-established standards for the field (i.e., Elements of Effective Practice), plus project funding from State Street and Mellon Bank, MMP had what it needed to put the building blocks in place for turning an idea into reality.