This episode features a conversation with Elizabeth Santiago, Chief Program Officer of MENTOR National, the Boston-based nonprofit that champions and advances the field of mentoring for youth. Liz’s personal experience as a young adolescent in middle school, and as a child of an under-resourced family who migrated from Puerto Rico to Boston, is a key driver in her professional work and showcases the potential that mentoring relationships can have in supporting young people who, like she once did, feel disconnected and disengaged and stop showing up.

Liz and Jason talk about the need young people have for representation of voices like their own, the gaps in mentoring opportunities for youth and ways MENTOR is addressing them, how the organization works with school systems and companies to set up and expand mentoring programs, and how to support mentors and mentees who hail from different backgrounds and communities from each other to engage in challenging conversations about our world, like racial inequity and political strife.

Additional Readings and Resources

• MENTOR National
  • “The Mentoring Effect: Young People’s Perspectives on the Outcomes and Availability of Mentoring,” a report for MENTOR: The National Mentoring Partnership by Civic Enterprises in association with Hart Research Associates, Mary Bruce and John Bridgeland, January 2014
  • “Social and Emotional Development in Early Adolescence: Tapping into the Power of Relationships and Mentoring Success Mentors,” Delia Hagan, Bernadette Sánchez, Jason Cascarino, Kilian White, 2019
  • Mentoring Amplifies: A New Campaign for the Mentoring Movement
  • National Mentoring Month
  • National Mentoring Summit
  • My Brother’s Keeper Success Mentors Initiative
  • Elements of Effective Mentoring
  • Black Youth Town Hall, a youth-led community dialogue aimed at supporting young people as they process recent events and the state of race relations, hosted by MENTOR and Youth Mentoring Action Network
• Reimagining Youth Work podcast, hosted by Dr. Torie Weiston-Serdan, Executive Director, Youth Mentoring Action Network
• Everyday Mentoring, The Mentoring Partnership of Southwestern PA
• National Mentoring Resource Center