We know that taking the time to reflect, learn and improve our mentoring programs is an integral part to creating the most effective mentoring program possible for the children and youth you serve. The Alberta Mentoring Partnership has always made Evaluation a key piece in all of our program resources, such as in our Teen Mentoring Program Toolkit’s Reflecting, Learning and Improving section where we highlight some important Evaluative Activities and provide some example surveys for your Mentors, Mentees and Program Staff.
The National Mentoring Resource Center in the USA, also knows the need for mentoring programs to provide informed decisions about strengthening their programs and in turn have created a very detailed Measurement Guidance Toolkit. This toolkit provides many evidence based instruments for measuring key youth outcomes in mentoring programs as well as several risk and protective factors that may be relevant to program outcomes.

Why you Should Evaluate Your Mentoring Programs

Typically we are all concerned about the outcomes of our mentoring programs, but often we don’t do our best or know how to best measure our outcomes. This is where MENTOR’s new toolkit comes in to play. With the goal of providing quality evidence based measurement tools, you can find it all in this toolkit in order to learn best practices when it comes to trying to get quality measures appropriate to the youth you serve.
By providing evidence based resources and by trying to mainstream these measurement tools, we are closer to having more mentoring programs use similar measurement tools – this makes it easier for researchers to measure on a much more macro level for the Mentoring field as a whole.
Learn more about the Measurement Guidance Toolkit

Capturing Youth Outcomes: An Introduction to the Measurement Guidance Toolkit for Mentoring Programs

Here is the introductory webinar done by MENTOR introducing their Measurement Guidance Toolkit. This webinar was hosted by Michael Garringer, MENTOR: The National Mentoring Partnership and Meghan Perry, Institute for Youth Success at Education Northwest with Panelists David DuBois, University of Illinois at Chicago and Carla Herrara, Independent Consultant.