Why Our Intervention Works for Immigrant and Refugee Populations
Immigrant and Refugee youth face a variety of challenges that demand a more skilled approach from a mentoring program. In addition to ensuring that mentoring programs meet all of the standards and enhanced practices advocated by mentoring research, Leaf Mentoring trains organizations and schools to address cultural, educational, economic, and acculturation needs specific to the immigrant and refugee populations they serve.
Evaluation of Needs
Leaf Mentoring conducts a preliminary evaluation of a school or community organization serving immigrant and refugee youth. The assessment involves comprehensive data gathering from all key stakeholders, organizational staff, immigrant youth and their families.
Creating Buy In
Leaf Mentoring communicates the need for and efficacy of mentoring interventions to all stakeholders, potential mentors, immigrant and refugee youth and their families.
Training a Mentoring Coordinator
In order to make the mentoring program self-sustaining, Leaf Mentoring trains a member of the staff to take the lead in training and coordinating all future mentoring programs. Leaf Mentoring assists in the identification of this staff member.
Guiding Initial Mentor and Mentee Selection and Matching
Together with the Mentoring Coordinator, Leaf Mentoring collaborates with organization or school staff to identify mentors and mentees. After the initial mentor training has taken place, Leaf Mentoring conducts the initial matching process between mentors and mentees.
Training
Leaf Mentoring presents the initial training for the first group of mentors and provides the necessary instruction and materials for the mentoring coordinator to run all future trainings. Special attention is given to cultural competence training for mentors to better understand and serve the immigrant population. In addition, enhanced training that mentors need in order to best address the variety of challenges that immigrant and refugee youth face is provided.
Establishment of Data Collection Procedures
Leaf Mentoring establishes outcome measures necessary for producing data for grant applications, presentations to key donors and promotional materials for prospective mentors and mentees.
Ongoing Supervision
To ensure that your mentoring initiative is successful and sustainable, Leaf Mentoring provides supervision after the initial visit. This ongoing support, supervision and guidance is one of the many factors that sets Leaf Mentoring’s interventions apart and ensures that schools and organizations are providing the most effective support for their immigrant and refugee populations.