Five Resources for Recruiting Volunteers to Your Mentoring Program

As the new school year has officially started, many youth mentoring organizations will receive an increase in the number of youth recommended to their programs. Because of this, we have compiled a list of some resources that can help recruit adult volunteers to your mentoring organization and to help you make more successful mentoring matches.

Putting the “Men” Back in Mentoring

Finding male volunteers is a problem that is faced by most mentoring programs. This article written by Michael Garringer provides information on why recruiting male mentors can be difficult for mentoring programs, and also gives some great ideas on how to bring more male mentors to your program.

For more great tips about getting men involved in mentoring, take a look at Mentor Michigan’s Men in Mentoring Toolkit. This can help you design a complete recruitment message, and gives lists of talking points that can help you to recruit male volunteers:

The Chronicle of Evidence-Based Mentoring

The Chronicle is a great online resource that provides new findings and research related to the youth mentoring field. It also aims to promote dialogue about youth mentoring, and does this by including forums on different topics in the mentoring field for people to add their own opinions. Many of these forums and the research featured in The Chronicle are excellent tools to help you come up with new volunteer recruitment ideas for your youth mentoring organization.

The latest Forum question in The Chronicle asks “What is your most effective mentor recruitment message?” If you have any recruitment messages that have worked particularly well for your program, join the discussion and add your thoughts. 

The ABCs of School-Based Mentoring

This resource provided by Education Northwest is especially relevant for schools or districts that are thinking about implementing on-site mentoring services. It contains an excellent section on recruiting volunteers, including a number of recruiting strategies and some of the challenges that can arise when recruiting on-site volunteers.

Monthly Webinars

Every month, Friends for Youth’s Mentoring Institute teams up with Mentoring Partnership of Minnesota’s Training Institute, Education Northwest/National Mentoring Center, Oregon Mentors, Mentoring Partnership of Southwestern Pennsylvania, and MENTOR to provide the Collaborative MentoringWebinar Series. These webinars focus on a broad range of topics, many of which could help your program in recruiting more mentors. You can also view past webinars, which are excellent resources for mentoring programs. The live webinars take place on the third Thursday of every month. The Collaborative recently held a webinar in July on Men in Mentoring; you can view the recording of the webinar and check out additional resources.

Twitter Tips

Finally, for more information on volunteer recruitment, take a look at Friends For Youth’s Mentoring Institute on Twitter, @MentorInstitute, as we will be sending out more recruitment resources throughout the month of September.

Thanks to the Mentoring Institute's summer intern, Megan Bridge, for this month's post!