In his career as an engineer in California and Colorado, Ken Brisco often spent time as a math tutor for kids.
He hesitated about signing on to become a formal mentor, however, despite the fact that the national “mentor gap” means that 15 million kids still need a caring adult to work with them.
“There was the responsibility and partial parenting role that came with it,” said Brisco, who ultimately decided to take the leap and become a mentor with Aurora Youth Options, a program for at-risk kids.
“You have to have the patience and the wherewithal to deal with all the issues that come up,” Brisco said. “There’s a minimum one-year commitment through thick and thin, and the kid and his family expect you to ride it out.”
Aurora Youth Options built this rock-solid commitment into its program because studies show that nearly 50 percent of mentor relationships end prematurely, which can harm the young people, many of whom have previously suffered abandonment from the adults in their lives.
“These children fade quietly from programs, and the troubled relationships they represent are overshadowed by the more compelling success stories of their peers,” leading expert Jean Rhodes wrote in a report she co-authored for a 2009 issue of “Professional Psychology: Research and Practice.”
Fifteen years into the launch of the modern mentoring movement, leaders in the field are working to ensure that it lives up to its potential.
Youth-mentoring programs have seen explosive growth since the release of a 1995 study of the national mentoring organization Big Brothers and Big Sisters of America, which found that youth who meet weekly with mentors are 52 percent less likely than their peers to miss a day of school, 46 percent less likely to start using illegal drugs and 27 percent less likely to start drinking.
That study was trumpeted everywhere from local media outlets to the floor of the U.S. Senate, and high expectations led to easy, lucrative funding.
This January, the 10th anniversary of National Mentoring Month, there are now 3 million kids in America involved in formal one-on-one mentoring relationships — a sixfold increase from 1998.
A new generation of programs is unfolding, including e-mentoring and Web-based mentor training, and there’s no sign of diminishing enthusiasm among funders.
Youth mentoring is “very popular with grant writing,” said Ken Broermann, mentor program coordinator at Aurora Youth Options. “It’s the ‘it’ thing with nonprofits, and there’s a lot of momentum there.”
But nationwide popularity has created some problems.
Experts estimate that about 15 million youths want a mentor, but there aren’t enough adults who volunteer.
This “mentor gap” is creating long waiting lists that pressure mentoring organizations to focus on quantity instead of quality, experts say. In the process, the essence of proven models gets diluted, they say, and no one is certain whether these changes will yield the same positive results for kids because the programs often are neither evidence-based nor tracked by rigorous, scientific evaluation.
“Despite expansive goals, there has been no clear road map for how to scale up this intervention approach in ways that provide high-quality mentoring relationships to all participants,” said a report in the “American Journal of Community Psychology.”
“We continue to fund things without really understanding what the impact is going to be,” Rhodes, who is chair of the public policy council for the National Mentoring Partnership, said in an interview. “We need to be very disciplined in aligning research with practice.”
Some of the newest approaches, such as e-mentoring and group mentoring, have been barely studied.
On the other hand, the field has witnessed positive developments in areas such as training, said Rhodes, a clinical psychologist at the University of Massachusetts, Boston.
“We’ve not had a very consistent way to train volunteers,” she said. “We were deploying them, and they may not have had much training in working with youth. But people are paying more attention now to training their volunteers.”
One of the latest developments is now taking place in her lab, where experts are creating a scientifically informed Web-based training program for mentors. It covers such key concepts as establishing a positive personal relationship, helping young people develop life skills and interacting with children and families from a variety of cultural groups.
In metro Denver, places such as the Youth Mentoring Collaborative offer an extensive list of enrichment classes for mentors — like “Burnout Free Mentoring” and “Turning Breakdowns into Breakthroughs” — to help them avoid common pitfalls, from shattered expectations to non- cooperation.
Brisco, who just learned about these classes, is interested in anything that can help hurdle whatever obstacles may come up.
“My biggest concern signing up for the program is that you’re signing up with the parent,” he said. “Our job is to supplement the parents, but if the parents and mentor are in discord, there can be a lot of problems.”
Brisco is starting to work with a 13-year-old middle-school boy in Aurora. On Monday, they spent the day together, marching in the Martin Luther King Jr. Day Marade, followed by lunch, and then roller skating at Skate City in Aurora.
For Brisco, who lives in Aurora, it’s about community.
“I’ve been blessed in many ways — with good parents, with minimal drama in my life, with having an open heart,” he said. “I see the need, with the number of single-parent families. We know in the African- American community there’s a higher percentage of mother-headed families.
“If I can make some small, little knick in that problem, it seems like something I should do.”
Colleen O’Connor: 303-954-1083 or coconnor@denverpost.com
A boost for mentoring
To support National Mentoring Month, there will be a fundraising lunch today from 10:30 a.m. to 4 p.m. at Noodles & Company, 10550 E. Garden Drive in Aurora.
Twenty-five percent of all sales will benefit the Youth Mentoring Collaborative, a group of nine mentoring organizations that helped Aurora win the 2010 “100 Best Cities for Young People” award from America’s Promise Alliance, a program started by retired Gen. Colin Powell to encourage kids
For more information on mentor enrichment training classes at the Youth Mentoring Collaborative in Denver, check the website or call 720-334-7153.
Also, the MENTOR/National Mentoring Partnership has developed the Elements of Effective Practice, plus a network of state and regional partnerships to support the adoption of these guidelines, which can be found at .
