title: From Treatment to Empowerment: New Approaches to Youth Mentoring.
abstract: Traditional approaches to formal youth mentoring have focused primarily on improving the lives of "at-risk" youth through the assignment of individual mentors who are typically disconnected from youth's communities. Similarly, research in the field of formal mentoring has emphasized the dyadic relationship between the mentor and the mentee, with less attention paid to the broader relational contexts in which such relationships unfold. The current paper proposes a new framework that expands the scope of mentoring interventions to include approaches that build on and cultivate informal supports and empower youth to identify and reach out to networks of potential supportive adults, thus increasing the reach of youth mentoring.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Suffolk University, Boston, MA, USA. seoschwartz@suffolk.edu.
authors.forename: Sarah E O
authors.initials: SE
authors.lastname: Schwartz
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Massachusetts Boston, Boston, MA, USA.
authors.forename: Jean E
authors.initials: JE
authors.lastname: Rhodes
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D062309:Community Integration; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D033182:Intention; D016901:Intergenerational Relations; D007398:Interpersonal Relations; D008297:Male; D000071252:Mentoring / Q000379:methods* / Q000458:organization & administration; D008875:Middle Aged; D011209:Power, Psychological; D012944:Social Support; D013598:Systems Theory
keywords: Adolescents; Empowerment; Mentoring; Positive youth development; Social capital