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
Recruiting Diverse Mentor Populations
Thursday, August 26 | 10-11:30 a.m.
Audience: Mentoring professionals and youth-serving professionals
A common challenge mentoring programs face is recruiting mentors and volunteers who reflect the young people they serve. This training will challenge participants to rethink mentor recruitment and focus on building relationships with diverse communities.
Elements of Effective Practice for Mentoring
Tuesday, September 14 | 9 a.m. – 4 p.m.
Audience: New mentoring professionals, individuals considering starting a mentoring program, and youth-serving organizations interested in offering mentoring services
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 learn the best practices of mentoring for recruiting, screening, training, matching, monitoring, supporting, and closing matches based on MENTOR’s Elements of Effective Practice for Mentoring.
Cultural Competency Miniseries
Thursday, October 14, 21, 28 | 3:30-4:30 p.m.
Audience: Mentors, mentoring professionals, and youth-serving professionals
Need a starting point for understanding youth today? Join us as we discuss using cultural competence to connect with youth culture. This miniseries will cover:
- October 14: Cultural Intelligence – Let’s Test your IQ - Register
- October 21: Cultural Differences- What Makes Us Different? - Register
- October 28: Teen Culture- Not your Teenage Years - Register
Custom Training & Consultation
MENTOR Nebraska offers mentoring and youth-serving organizations up to 50 hours per year of no-cost training and consultation through the National Mentoring Resource Center. Some recent examples of our work with mentoring programs include:
- Social Emotional Learning training
- Recruiting BIPOC Mentors training
- Combatting White Saviorism training
- Development and revision of mentor training materials
- Analysis of mentor screening processes
- Analysis of match support processes
- In-depth evaluation planning
We would love to meet with you to get to know your unique mentoring program, discuss your program’s needs, and figure out how we might best be able to partner with you to improve the quality of your program.
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.