Training Schedule

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

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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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

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

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

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

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

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

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-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