Silver Lining Mentoring

The community based Mentoring program matches youth impacted by foster care in a one-to-one Mentoring relationship with a volunteer adult. The program maintains its reputation for precedent-setting outcomes as Silver Lining Mentoring's average mentor-mentee match length of over three years is more than twice the national average of 1.5 years.

Silver Lining routinely receives inquiries from organizations across the country seeking to learn how to support young people in foster care. In response to this demand, the Silver Lining institute (sli) was launched in late 2019 as the national thought leadership division of Silver Lining Mentoring. Sli provides customized training and technical assistance with the goal of increasing access to high quality Mentoring for youth in foster care. The institute also engages in systems change advocacy and movement building work to ensure that providers, policy makers and laypeople understand that Mentoring relationships are an essential part of healthy development for youth in foster care. Sli provides thought leadership on the needs of youth in care, the impact of Mentoring, and best practices to ensure that more youth in foster care nationwide can benefit from long term Mentoring relationships and the support they need to thrive.

Learn & earn is an intensive 12-week life skills curriculum, during which youth, their mentors, and slm staff meet weekly for two hours to work on skills such as budgeting, resume-writing, banking, financial literacy, interview skills and more. Youth earn a stipend for each curriculum component they successfully complete allowing youth to build assets to support their transition to adulthood. With this earned money youth have paid rent, college tuition, and purchased laptops for schoolwork and professional clothing, meeting critical needs for adulthood.