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Mentoring
A mentor can be defined as someone who helps others to achieve their potential. Mentoring may involve coaching and encouraging, constructively criticising, explaining, listening and guiding. One feature of mentoring is a one-to-one relationship between an adult mentor and a young person, established to help the young person to achieve his or her goals.
For young people at risk, a volunteer mentor from their own community is someone they can rely on, who is not associated with other adults in authority in their lives (police, teachers, social workers, probation officers, even parents), with whom they may have had difficult relationships. Mentors can provide young people with extra support and a positive adult role model.
Mentors can have a variety of roles, from supporting young people going back into education or training, helping them find a job, or improving their literacy and numeracy skills. Being a mentor requires you to take an interest in the young person with whom you work and encourage them to keep working at the areas which put them at risk of offending.
What does mentoring achieve?
Mentoring provides a one-to-one personal relationship that can act as a protective factor to divert young people away from many forms of failure, and provide them with opportunities for success.
Holistic support, through community-based mentoring approaches, can address some of the risk factors that young people are exposed to (drugs, poor educational attainment, relationship issues, homelessness and transience).
The young person centred approach of mentoring allows young people to look at a range of barriers to their success and allows them to address their issues as they define them, and at their own pace.
What to do next
If you are interested in being a mentor to a young person who has offended or who may be at risk of doing so, contact your local youth offending team.
If you would like to volunteer to mentor a young person who is in custody, you will need to directly contact an agency running mentoring schemes, such as Nacro. See their website at www.nacro.org.uk/about/volunteering.htm [opens in a new window] or email volunteering@nacro.org.uk.