Mentor Nebraska

Mentor Nebraska embarked on a partnership with the office of refugee resettlement, omaha public schools, grand island public schools, and lincoln public schools to increase access to formal mentoring opportuntities for refugee students in the us less than 5 years. Strive is an in-school mentoring model that matches recently arrived refugee students with school faculty to faciliate opportunities for deeper school engagement, expanded support network in the school community, and opportunities for civic engagement. Nearly 150 youth were served through this project with plans for further expansion across the state.

Mentor Nebraska has consistently sought to bring innovation to the mentoring sector by helping to establish "new models" of mentoring that reach audiences in unique and supportive ways. We introduced a new evidenced-based mentoring model, called success mentors, and the model is being used to support 234 chronically absent youth in omaha public schools, millard public schools, and grand island public schools. Eight years ago, we were the first in the country to initiate another new mentoring model, called youth initiated mentoring (yim) to support juvenile justice youth. National resesarchers and evaluators have called our model "game changing" for supporting this audience.

Each year, Mentor Nebraska provides valuable member benefits that impact the quality of mentoring across the sector. One of the benefits is no cost training and technical assistance to youth providers, mentoring professionals, mentors, school personnel, community/business leaders and public officials to focus on best practices for youth mentoring. In 2023: we trained 300+ individuals through 20 trainings and provided 825 hours of technical assistance support. In addition, direct funding for background screenings allows member partners to utliize screening practices to ensure thorough vetting is done of volunteers matched through their mentoring programs.