As a resource to promote best practices throughout Nebraska, MENTOR Nebraska provides several fundamental training and assessment tools at no cost to mentoring programs. These training opportunities help mentoring programs gain the support and resources they need to provide high quality mentoring experiences.
MENTOR Nebraska Trainings
Action Planning: How to Implement Culturally Responsive Programming
Thursday, December 16 | 1-2:30 p.m. CT
Audience: Mentoring professionals and youth-serving professionals
Presenter: Marisa Hattab and Monica Dixon
Following MENTOR Nebraska’s fall symposium that discussed reimagining mentoring through an equity lens, participants will continue the conversation around practical action planning within their program delivery services to ensure their practices are equitable and culturally responsive and welcoming.
Elements of Effective Practice Miniseries
Thursdays in February | 10 a.m. - 12 p.m. CT
Audience: Mentoring professionals
Presenter: Christopher Margadonna
Are you considering starting a mentoring program or want to strengthen your current program? This training will provide an overview of research-informed and practitioner-approved standards for creating and sustaining quality youth mentoring programs and consequently, impactful mentoring relationships.
Participants will be able to select which EEP standards they desire to do a deeper dive into:
- Week 1 (Feb 10): EEP Standards 1 and 2: Recruitment & Screening
- Week 2 (Feb 17): EEP Standards 3 and 4: Training & Matching
- Week 3 (Feb 24): EEP Standards 5 and 6: Monitoring and Support & Closing
Register for Feb 10: Recruitment & Screening
The Askable Adults Matter training is designed to help youth-serving professionals and mentors become more approachable and knowledgeable in order to address basic questions and refer youth for reproductive health care when needed. The training is committed to providing medically-accurate, culturally-inclusive, age-appropriate information and education related to reproductive health and healthy relationships. The training also promotes healthy communication between adolescents and their parents, families and trusted adults to help them make informed decisions about their reproductive health and relationships.
This training is an introduction to the best practices for mentoring program design, management, operations, and evaluation. The content provides school, community, and faith-based organizations with tools to learn the basics of designing a quality mentoring program based on MENTOR’s Elements of Effective Practice for Mentoring™. This training also provides the foundation of mentoring best practices for recruitment, screening, training, matching and initiating, monitoring and support, and closure.
Ensuring youth are safe is a top priority in the mentoring sector. This training helps mentoring and youth-serving organizations evaluate their volunteer screening practices and offers suggestions on how programs can strengthen their screening processes to keep youth safe. Participants will learn how to identify characteristics of child predators, stages of the grooming process, and red flags to look for when screening potential and current volunteers.
In order to build authentic relationships with Black and Latino young men, mentors must delve deep into their own power and privilege, unpack their own biases, and understand how to manage and use them in a mentoring relationship. In this training, mentors will become more deeply aware of and reflect on their own power and privilege, and gain skills and strategies needed to develop authentic relationships with Black & Latino young men. Mentors will learn how to support Black and Latino young men in their journey of empowerment with evidence-based strategies, and work positively towards structural change.
Trauma-informed mentoring is an approach to help mentors and youth serving programs recognize and acknowledge the role trauma plays in young people’s lives. This training covers how trauma affects young people, what trauma-informed care is, how to create safe environments for young people, and practices to avoid re-traumatizing. Participants will also identify self-care strategies to combat “compassion fatigue” and build assets to better serve young people and their mentors.