Mentoring Immigrant and Refugee Youth

Welcome to the "Mentoring Immigrant and Refugee Youth" Section of the Elements of Effective Practice Toolkit

"Mentoring Immigrant and Refugee Youth" is an important new section of the toolkit, How to Build a Successful Mentoring Program Using the Elements of Effective Practice. This vital addition offers programs essential resources to better understand and serve the unique needs, challenges, and assets of the quickly growing immigrant and refugee youth population in the United States.

MENTOR is pleased to announce the publication of the Mentoring Immigrant Youth: A Toolkit for Program Coordinators. Developed with the generous support of the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation, this toolkit is a comprehensive resource that is designed to offer program staff important background information, promising program practices and strategies to build and sustain high-quality mentoring relationships for immigrant youth. Included in this resource are five chapters focused on the skills needed to design, plan, manage, operate and evaluate programming specifically for immigrant youth in your area. Each chapter has a series of "ready-to-use" tools, templates and training exercises. To download the PDF of the toolkit, click here.

Background Information

Today, more than 1 in 5 children are immigrants or children of immigrants. This number is expected to rise to 30% of all US children by 2015. This quickly growing population faces unique challenges and risks that require special program planning and design, operations, management, and evaluation considerations.

According to Dr. Jean Rhodes, immigrant youth are more likely to face stress related to exclusion, poverty, and separation from family. In addition to these factors, the strain placed on parent-child relationships during assimilation have created an important need for caring adults and mentors to advocate and foster resiliency in today's immigrant and refugee youth populations. "Mentoring Immigrant and Refugee Youth" offers special tools for programs to strengthen mentoring efforts that are targeted to these populations.

Downloadable Tools

The tool kit contains ready-to-use tools that you can download and adapt to your program's needs.

A note about using these important new tools—"Mentoring Immigrant and Refugee Youth" is not meant to be a stand-alone resource. Mentoring program staff should carefully follow guidelines found in the toolkit, How to Build a Successful Mentoring Program Using the Elements of Effective Practice and use these new tools as additional resources to effectively serve this unique population of young people.

Special thanks to the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation for their generous support of these important resources.

Tools Available

Download the Toolkit

Download the Toolkit

Mentoring Immigrant and Refugee Youth

Background Information

Downloadable Tools

Tools Available