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Training Schedule

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

Elements of Effective Practice for Mentoring
Tuesday, September 14 | 9 a.m. – 4 p.m. CST
Audience: 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.

Sponsored by: Fraser Stryker, Bland Cares Foundation, One Source Inc., and Vic Gutman & Associates

Register

Cultural Competency Miniseries
Thursday, October 14, 21, 28 | 3:30-4:30 p.m. CST
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:  

  1. October 14: Cultural Intelligence – Let’s Test your IQ      
  2. October 21: Cultural Differences- What Makes Us Different?
  3. October 28: Teen Culture- Not Your Teenage Years

Sponsored by: Lamp Rynearson, MUD, OPPD, and SilverStone Group, a HUB International company

Register for Culture Intelligence - Oct 14

Register for Culture Differences - Oct 21

Register for Teen Culture - Oct 28

Fostering Youth Purpose
Thursday, November 4 | 10-11:30 a.m. CST
Audience:  Mentors, mentoring professionals, and youth-serving professionals

How do you help a young person find purpose? Based off MENTOR National’s “Youth Purpose Guide,” this training is an introduction to fostering purpose for a young person at any age. Participants will learn the importance of purpose and key ideas for exploring it together. Ultimately, this training will equip caring adults with the tools they need to know to assist in the journey of finding purpose.

This training will be facilitated by Christopher Margadonna from MENTOR Rhode Island.

Register

MENTOR National & Affiliate Trainings

Beyond DEI Statements: An Honest Conversation about Implementation
Wednesday, September 22 | Noon - 1:15 p.m. CT
Presented by MENTOR National

Join us for an honest conversation with mentoring and youth-serving practitioners who are working to implement diversity, equity, and inclusion at an organizational level. Through this session, you’ll have the chance to learn from their experiences and how they’ve navigated impediments, obstacles, and barriers they’ve faced to create environments where people feel included and safe. Together, we’ll explore the challenges, the wins, the tough decisions, and the reflections along the way and what you can do within your own mentoring organization.

Register



Advancing Inclusive Mentoring Briefing - Part 2
Thursday, September 23 | Noon - 1:30 p.m. CT
Presented by MENTOR National

Building off of July's successful congressional briefing, MENTOR, along with the National Disability Mentoring Coalition (NDMC), Partners for Youth with Disabilities (PYD), and the American Association for People with Disabilities (AAPD) will hold a second community briefing. The briefing will further define and discuss the four programmatic and policy priorities to move inclusive mentoring forward: connecting with more role models; connecting with more mentors; building a peer mentoring workforce; and delivering inclusive and accessible e-mentoring solutions. ASL interpreters and live captioning will be available.

Register



Mentoring Youth Impacted by Substance Use & the Opioid Crisis
Tuesday, September 28 | 1-2:30 p.m. CT
Presented by OJJDP NMRC

While we are still learning about the wide and deep impacts of the pandemic, increased isolation, and major changes in how we all operate in school, at home, and in the community, we know that the opioid crisis continues to affect youth and their families across the country. In addition, substance use, misuse, and addiction of any kind are specific experiences that affect many of the young people we work with. In this webinar, we'll look at the ways in which substance use is often a trauma response for young people, as well as trauma producing when it's a challenge for youths' families and loved ones. We'll start with a presentation by Elizabeth Joy, MBA, MSW, LISW-S, LCDCIII, BCC; and a moderated panel discussion with two OJJDP grantees who are integrating understanding of this issue into their mentoring models: Eluna and Road Recovery.

Register

Mentoring Youth Impacted by Sexual Exploitation
Thursday, September 30 | 1-2:30 p.m. CT
Presented by OJJDP NMRC

If you're an organization currently mentoring youth who have been impacted by sexual exploitation or are not sure if your mentees have experienced this, this webinar from the OJJDP NMRC is for you. Join MENTOR, My Life My Choice, and Youth Collaboratory for information sharing and discussion around defining what exploitation is and risk factors. We will discuss how to support youth who have experienced this or are at risk for experiencing it and will learn more about survivor-led programming, trauma-informed responses, and prevention. You'll have the opportunity to ask questions and have smaller group conversations in this webinar so that you'll gain more info and support in your work in mentoring.

Register

Collaborative Mentoring Webinar Series
3rd Thursday of Every Month | Noon - 1:15 p.m. CT
Presented by MENTOR National
The Collaborative Mentoring Webinar Series is funded by the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention through the National Mentoring Resource Center and facilitated in partnership with MENTOR: The National Mentoring Partnership. These webinars would not be possible without the planning team, which includes the following Affiliates: MENTOR Colorado, MENTOR Illinois, MENTOR Independence Region, MENTOR Indiana, MENTOR North Carolina, MENTOR Vermont, and MENTOR Washington. Through ongoing planning and evaluation of the latest developments in the field, this team delivers a webinar each month focused on strengthening mentoring practice, sharing new resources, and helping the field put research into practice.

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Additional Trainings

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.

Request a Training

Askable Adults Matter

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.

Audience: Mentors, mentoring professionals, and youth-serving professionals

Collaborative Mentoring Webinar Series

Through ongoing planning and evaluation of the latest developments in the field, these monthly webinars focus on strengthening mentoring practice, sharing new resources, and helping the field put research into practice.  The Collaborative Mentoring Webinar Series is funded by the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention through the National Mentoring Resource Center and facilitated in partnership with MENTOR National. These webinars would not be possible without the planning team, which includes our affiliates:  MENTOR Colorado, MENTOR Illinois, MENTOR Independence Region, MENTOR Indiana, MENTOR North Carolina, MENTOR Vermont, and MENTOR Washington.

Webinars are held monthly on the 3rd Thursday from 12:00 – 1:15 p.m. CT.  Links to register for the upcoming webinar, with full descriptions and panelist information, are posted in the month leading up to the webinar.

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Combatting White Saviorism

Mentoring relationships and programs have the power to reproduce or reduce racial and economic inequality. They also have a moral obligation to do no harm to the youth and families being served. This session will explore what white saviorism looks like as well as the harmful impact it has on youth. Participants will develop the ability to recognize white saviorism in mentoring relationships and programs and explore concrete strategies to combat its harmful effects.

Audience: Mentors, mentoring professionals, and youth-serving professionals

Connect Focus Grow

The Connect Focus Grow training was developed to help young people, mentors, and managers in the workplace learn the skills needed to deepen relationships. This activity and discussion based training explores how adults and young people can work together to create a culture of possibility.

Audience: Mentors, mentoring professionals, youth-serving professionals, managers, coaches, and workforce development organizations

Introduction to the Elements of Effective Practice for Mentoring

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.

Audience: New mentoring professionals, individuals considering starting a mentoring program, and youth-serving organizations interested in offering mentoring services

Recruiting Diverse Mentors

A common challenge mentoring programs face is recruiting mentors who reflect the young people they serve. This training teaches mentoring programs how to build relationships and recruit mentors from diverse communities.

Audience: Mentoring professionals and youth-serving professionals

Screening Applicants for Effectiveness (SAFE)

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.

Audience: Mentoring professionals and youth-serving professionals

Social Emotional Learning

When it comes to social emotional development, relationships matter, especially during COVID-19. Mentoring is a powerful vehicle for social emotional learning (SEL) development and growth both in school and out-of-school time settings. This interactive webinar will provide a foundation of what SEL is (and is not), the importance of SEL development in young people, and how this healthy development increases their chances of future academic, career, and life success. Participants will walk away with activities and strategies for staff and mentors to use in their mentoring sessions.

Audience: Mentors, mentoring professionals, and youth-serving professionals

The Essentials: Mentoring Young Black & Latino Men

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.

Audience: Mentors, mentoring professionals, and youth-serving professionals

Trauma & Recovery 101

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.

Audience: Mentors, mentoring professionals, and youth-serving professionals