Paying it forward, with mentoring or mocha

By Joshua Kukowski

I had my first “pay it forward” experience at a coffee shop recently and I was confronted with a choice: should I continue the trend?   I had no scientific evidence that paying it forward to the next coffee drinker would be a good thing to do. I just knew.  I bought the next person a cup of coffee.

Mentoring is like that. There are now 15 years' worth of research proving that mentoring helps young people succeed.  But mentors do it because they just know.

Recently, my colleague Brian McNeill and I gave a webinar called “(RE)THINKING MENTORING.” It was an overview of interesting research findings about mentoring that confirm what we already know and tell us more about why it works and how to do it really well. We had participants from large and small programs backed by solid research and best practices.

Mentoring is more than a trendy program that can be seen as a quick way to increase enrollment, get funding or show the value of your program.  But like most afterschool or out-of-school programs, mentoring isn’t cute and it’s nothing new.  There are standards for mentoring programs, much like standards for our students in public schools and much like standards for home construction.  Each of these standards comes from validated research and gives benchmarks for improvement.

The research does nothing to take away from the strength of locally developed best practices.  Researcher and author Jerry Sherk said it best: “Mentoring can be summed up as three things:  Relationship, Relationship and Relationship.”

On a recent trip abroad, I noticed that mentoring was happening without formal research behind it there, too.  I visited a foundation in Columbia that was supporting youth through direct one-on-one relationships and through group and peer mentoring.  I asked a mentor how the program was going and about the benefits. He looked at me like I was silly and said, “This isn't a program and we don’t do it for benefit. We do it because it is important.”

In my opinion, blending best practices from research and the experience and wisdom of local leaders is the recipe for mentoring success. In fact, it’s what mentoring programs are all about. How do you combine the two? Are they aligned? Do they validate each other? Do they compete or conflict with each other in any way? How do you facilitate those conversations?

-- Joshua Kukowski, Extension educator

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