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.
Upcoming Training Opportunities:
Inspire, Engage, and Cultivate Excellent Employees for Mentoring Programs
Thursday, July 16 | 12-1:15 p.m. CT | Collaborative Mentoring Webinar Series
Youth mentoring programs work really hard to tackle big issues with limited resources. Without the funds to offer higher salaries and robust benefits packages though, organizations often struggle to develop and retain excellent employees. This limits the mentoring program’s full potential and participant impact. This webinar will explore three specific strategies and numerous approaches to inspire, engage, and cultivate excellent employees – even in traditionally high turnover positions. Participants will hear from mentoring expert panelists about how to bring these strategies to life and will leave this session with at least two tactics to implement immediately in their mentoring programs.
Audience: Mentors, mentoring professionals, youth-serving professionals, and community members
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.
The SAFE training helps evaluate current methods and offer suggestions for strengthening mentoring program practices. The workshop focuses on characteristics of child predators, the grooming process, and red flags that will cue programs to take a closer look at potential mentors and ensure they are the right fit. Participants take away tools and approaches for the screening process that range from first contact with a potential mentor until long after the match is made.
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.