MENTOR has worked for almost 30 years to provide supportive and reliable relationships for young people. MENTOR relationships help youth connect with others, reach their goals, and find support in others within their same community.
According to MENTOR, one in every three young people lacks critical support relationships to help them grow and succeed. Their aim is to close that gap by providing youth with supportive adult mentors that they need to grow into productive and engaged members of the community.
Partnering with The Lynch Foundation
Since 1990, The Lynch Foundation made our initial investment in this powerful idea. We were inspired by the mission that aims to guarantee young people who care about them, assures them they are not alone in dealing with day-to-day challenges, and makes them feel like they matter.
This modest seed funding supported the creation of MENTOR.
We followed up with a unanimously approved expansion grant in 1998 to launch MENTOR sites across the country. This also allowed for the creation of a Mass Mentoring program to support our local community.
The Lynch Foundation has continued this partnership for almost three decades. Thanks to this partnership, we’ve helped MENTOR:
- Increase the number of at-risk youth in structured mentoring relationships from 300,000 to 4.5 million; growing 15 fold
- Become the only national advocate for mentorship
- Create and maintain the only national database connecting volunteers to opportunities in their local communities
Looking a bit closer to home, Mass Mentoring specifically has established a network of more than 370 mentoring and youth-serving organizations that represent over 50,000 young people statewide.