What's New in Volunteer Screening?

Recently, I've had the opportunity to lead several in-person and web-based trainings on screening volunteers using an updated version of our classic training based on SAFE (Screening Applicants for Effectiveness): Guidelines to Prevent Child Molestations in Mentoring and Youth-Serving Organizations. MENTOR/National Mentoring Partnership collaborated with us in April, this month I worked with the Iowa Mentoring Partnership and led trainings for new YouthBuild U.S.A. mentoring programs, and in August, I'll be leading another webinar with the Mentoring Partnership of Minnesota. So, what's new? Unfortunately, what's not new is the necessity to have a stringent screening process. There are still people out in the world who intend to do harm to young people by having inappropriate relationships with and sexually abusing them. Each week brings more news about adults in trusted positions (see recent articles on the Boy Scouts of America) who violate boundaries with children and youth in their charge. We have been providing SAFE training now for 5 years, reaching over 500 youth-serving and mentoring programs who now use our resource in developing their guidelines. Standards have definitely improved over the years and I'm pleased to say that I hear more program staff say that the training validates what they're already doing rather than making them panic about what they're not doing! Several key points have been updated over the years:

• Adding Internet searches ("Googling" a potential volunteer) to the application process
• Having more access to public information on criminal history and records (see the Dru Sjodin National Sex Offender Registry)
• The Diana Screen - a new tool to help strengthen a program's application process by identifying individuals who are a sexual risk to children

State laws are still confusing when it comes to criminal histories and sometimes they contradict national standards. We always emphasize - and this is validated by these contradictions, delays in postings, and general mix-ups of information - that a background check is not the most important part of the application process. Using your informed intuition, or the sense of observing your gut feelings about a person combined with the objective information from application materials, will be the most critical factor. Check out the webinar sponsored by MENTOR/National Mentoring Partnership and look for our schedule of webinars covering this topic in more depth soon!

Donate Now and Your Gift Will Be Matched!

You can make a difference in the lives of at-risk youth by supporting Friends for Youth and now is a great time to donate!

We have 45 boys and 33 girls waiting to be matched with mentors.  Our Mentoring Services team interviews these young people, recruits volunteers, interviews and trains them, then makes and supports the Friendships.

Our Mentoring Institute shares knowledge from our 31 years of experience as well as current research on mentoring with agencies that want to start or improve their programs.

Support Friends for Youth now and your donation will essentially double.  Thanks to a matching grant from the Sobrato Family Foundation, once we raise $25,000 in new or incremental funding from donors, we will receive an additional $25,000.  Thanks to the Sobrato Foundation and all of our supporters!

Friends for Youth bowling for fun

What do bowling, pizza, arcade games, and waitlisted Junior Friends have in common? They all converged last week for a special activity designed to support youth who are waiting to be matched in the Friends for Youth program!

Youth from Santa Clara and San Mateo Counties enjoyed unlimited bowling and pizza in an evening filled with high-fives, strikes, and a few spares. Friends for Youth is eager to match each of these youth with a mentor soon.

If you’d like to do things like go bowling, hiking, visit a museum, or play board games with a young person who needs a positive adult in their life, then you should become a mentor today! We invite you to attend an Information Session to learn more about mentoring with Friends for Youth.

Special thanks to the Columbia Neighborhood Center for co-hosting this fun and safe event.

GAP Photo Activity

Thanks to Darren Ferreira for volunteering to photograph Friendships again last Saturday.  We so appreciate his time and talent and the wonderful photographs we have thanks to him!

What's Important in Mentor Training?

Lately, I've been providing Mentor Training for a few organizations whose mentors are just beginning their commitments. In providing this training, I find out from the program staff what important aspects of mentor training are most important to cover (and how much time I have!). The Mentoring Institute has offered this training to a number of agencies over the years and we believe we have a solid foundation that can apply to any kind of mentoring program whether the minimum commitment is for two years or three months. (Usually when the mentoring relationship is less than a school or calendar year, I encourage programs to call their volunteers something else, like coaches or apprentice mentors - the shorter time period can dilute the definition of mentoring that we advocate when it comes to formal programs for youth.) So, what's important? Here's a selection of what we believe needs to be included:

• Mentoring Basics - defining mentoring, having participants reflect on their own mentoring relationships, outlining the potential impacts, and giving a theoretical framework
• Youth Development and Cultural Considerations - explaining the Search Institute's 41 Developmental Assets and how mentoring can positively impact them, listing (and personally remembering!) the stages of adolescence, and considering a few important cultural competencies and, again, how them might affect a mentoring relationship
• Key Skills for Mentoring - explaining and practicing realistic expectations, setting limits and boundaries, active listening, and motivation
• Roles & Responsibilities - provided specifically by the host program so that mentors clearly understand their own boundaries and what they're supposed to do and what can get them terminated from the program

Role plays are crucial to Mentor Training, especially if they're not done like the usual workplace role play - have some fun and help participants feel comfortable and safe to explore responses. While I was working directly with mentors and mentees in our program, I constantly heard from mentors about the scenario we used in training that actually happened! (Usually, they said they flashed back to the training session and would try to remember the advice we offered, sometimes with success and sometimes not, but always they remembered enough to move through that difficult situation.) Two of the most common scenarios I use for almost every program are:

• Establishing communication and meeting habits ("Your mentee is not returning your telephone calls/responding to emails or voice mails or texts")
• Working through a difficult situation that involves significantly more trust in the mentor to reveal what is really happening with the mentee ("Your mentee started to open up about what's going on at home/at school/with friends" or "Your mentee is saying that everything is fine, but you're not sure/hearing from program staff it's not/suspicious that there is something really bothering him or her")

One or both of these scenarios happen in so many youth mentoring relationships and giving mentors a chance to practice how to respond before they've even interacted with their mentees can not only help them but also reduce staff time in responding to these situations. Empowering your mentors to solve problems will also help them role model solving problems to their mentees. Finally, if it's applicable to a program's focus and if the mentors and mentees having been meeting for awhile, I like to look at any creative work produced by the mentees and practice "listening"with the mentors to what their mentees are expressing through another outlet besides words. A great example is using activity pages from the Mentoring Journal, whether produced one-on-one with a mentor or in a group.

The First Exposures program in San Francisco (where I was a mentor back in my early 20's) invites me in halfway through the year to review photographs and writings from the students. All mentors in attendance get to contribute their thoughts and observations to arrive at solutions to obstacles a particular mentor is facing or perhaps just to positively reinforce the work they've done together.

What do you consider important in mentor training?