“It Just Helps to Have Someone There:" Youth-Initiated Mentorship for Former Foster Care Youth

Background and Purpose: A small but growing body of evidence indicates that foster care youth who have a natural mentor have lower rates of stress and depression and higher college enrollment, compared to those who do not While many foster care youth may naturally enlist the support of caring and committed adults, others may need help making and sustaining these connections. Some may simply lack the skills or confidence while others may be skeptical that doing so would be of much help due to prior negative experiences with adults. Youth-initiated mentoring (YIM) is an innovative approach that scaffolds youth in the development of mentoring relationships by helping the youth identify adults from within their existing social networks to serve as mentors and formalizing these relationships.  Despite the appeal of this approach due to its potential to address long-standing challenges faced by formal mentoring programs, such as volunteer recruitment and retention, only a handful of programs have instituted YIM.  This presentation will detail findings from a qualitative interview study examining the implementation of YIM by a program serving youth in and transitioning out of the foster care system.

Methods: In-depth semi-structured qualitative interviews were conducted with 12 youth participants (8 female) in the YIM program. These youth, aged 16-25, were racially diverse (50% White, 50% Multiracial). At the time of the interviews, youth had been matched with their mentors for less than 1 year.  Interviews were audio-recorded and transcribed verbatim then coded thematically.

Findings: Although YIM clearly impacts mentor selection, these youth’s narratives indicated that YIM had influenced their experience of the entire mentoring process – from their own engagement in mentoring through relationship development and duration. The youth described selecting mentors they knew and trusted and placed particular emphasis on how important it was to them that the adult selected knew about their history and was not judgmental of them. This seemed to make them more open to engaging in the mentoring process and contributed to their beginning these relationships already feeling comfortable with their mentors and also having some trust in them. The youth also spoke about the significant and varied forms of support they experienced in the context of these relationships.

Implications: The findings from this study suggest that YIM is a promising approach for fostering strong and impactful mentoring relationships among foster care youth. The selection of mentors the youth already knew and trusted seemed to accelerate the mentoring process and some of these youth even credited their mentors with the successes they experienced in the transition out of care. These findings indicated that greater attention to YIM is warranted and further research is needed to determine the effectiveness of YIM more generally and to identify the specific ways that YIM may promote positive transitions for foster care youth and the mechanisms through which such outcomes may be achieved.