This study assesses the impact of a mentoring model in Boys and Girls Clubs (BGC).
This study seeks to fill a gap in knowledge about the impacts of mentoring on youth outcomes by documenting an enhanced mentoring approach for urban Boys and Girls Clubs (BGC) in the Southeastern United States delivered by paid staff who serve as mentors through group activities and 1:1 interactions with youth. The authors find the presented approach has a significant relationship with retention with those mentored being 1.92 times more likely to return the following program year. Mentored youth also experienced higher expectations from staff and were less likely to be involved in a physical fight with peers. The researchers perform logistic regressions of secondary data from a cohort of BGCs to understand the relationships between enhanced mentoring and youth outcomes related to program retention, behaviors, and academics. Although federal funding has been provided to add mentoring to youth development programs for decades, researchers still lack knowledge about the impacts of mentoring on youth outcomes (Published Abstract Provided)