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MENTOR’s 2017 National Mentoring Summit

by Opportunity Nation   •  

Last week, Opportunity Nation was pleased to be a Supporting Partner and attendee at MENTOR’s 2017 National Mentoring Summit in Washington, DC. The Summit was a great opportunity to interact with over 1,000 mentoring leaders from across the country — including many of our own Coalition members — and to hear about best practices in advancing the mentoring movement.

Powerful speakers throughout the event discussed how mentors and the presence of caring adults is critical for improving the lives of young people by boosting their academic achievement, social development and chances for achieving the American Dream. Breakout session topics ranged from how to develop a corporate youth mentoring program to how to support youth and families with special needs.

One session we found particularly interesting was a discussion on how to pursue a Pay for Success contracting strategy. Friends of the Children, a youth development organization that provides the highest risk children with 12 consecutive years of transformative mentoring relationships, shared lessons learned before attendees engaged in a robust discussion about the opportunities and challenges of Pay for Success partnerships.

Another session produced by ServiceWorks about the power of short-term success coaching included a mentor and his mentee, and proved to be a powerful lesson in effective long-term, and sometimes unlikely, relationships that can be formed when two people are randomly paired.

MENTOR Executive Director David Shapiro closed out the Summit with a call to action and message for attendees that “We can’t fix the noise, but we can be there for the kids trying to make sense of the shouting.”

The Summit also kicked off with a Capitol Hill Day that saw hundreds of advocates storm the Hill to meet with their Senators and Representatives about their local mentoring programs and encourage support for mentoring legislation.

MENTOR, an Opportunity Nation Coalition member, provides a public voice for mentoring programs nationwide and promotes quality for mentoring through standards, cutting-edge research and state of the art tools.

Opportunity Nation Opportunity Nation is a bipartisan, national campaign comprised of more than 350 cross-sector organizations working together to expand economic mobility and close the opportunity gap in America. Opportunity Nation envisions the United States as a nation where everyone – regardless of where they were born – has equal access to opportunity, economic mobility, and success at all stages of life.

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