iMentor Interactive’s mission is to facilitate the development of high-quality, high-impact mentoring programs which address the most critical challenges facing underserved youth through an innovative combination of partnership, technology, curriculum, research and ongoing support.

By serving schools and non-profits that serve our young people most in need, one day, every young person who needs a mentor will have a mentor. By focusing these mentoring relationships on the most critical challenges facing underserved youth, mentoring can play a signature role in increasing the impact of organizations working to close the achievement gap. Through iMi facilitated mentoring programs, mentors and mentees will work together to break down barriers to personal, academic and career success. iMentor Interactive will support high-quality, high-impact mentoring programs that ensure that all young people have the opportunity to pursue their highest potential. Engaging volunteer mentors in a critical mass of schools and non-profits will allow participating communities to serve the rising generation by tapping into a new wave of human capital, unlocking resources and igniting civic engagement. No single organization can drive a national mentoring movement. A true mentoring movement can only be achieved by embedding high-quality, high-impact mentoring programs into a critical mass of the nation’s non-profits and schools. iMentor Interactive provides a proven, cost-effective and scalable solution that will drive this effort.

There are three critical challenges standing in the way of a substantial and sustainable national mentoring movement. In order to drive this movement, iMentor Interactive addresses all three challenges:

          - The Mentoring Gap

          - The Quality Gap

          - The Civic Engagement Gap

The Mentoring Gap: There is a 15 million person mentoring gap in this country: 15 million young people considered high-need for mentoring with no access to mentors or formal mentoring programs. Nationwide, only 3 million adults volunteer as mentors. Yet, 44 million adults have expressed interest in mentoring. Activating this pool of potential mentors is the first step in driving a national mentoring movement.

iMentor has proven itself to be a powerful model for engaging volunteers who would not participate in traditional mentoring models. Over the last 10 years, iMentor has matched and supported more than 7,000 mentors, reaching an annual enrollment of 1,000 mentors in 2009. Of iMentor’s volunteers: 70% have never served as mentors before and 52% did not participate in any other volunteer opportunities before enrolling in the iMentor program. Currently, iMentorNYC has more than 300 mentors on the waiting list. The flexibility and structure of iMentor’s mentoring model allows the organization to activate first time volunteers. The support iMentor provides assures these volunteers are effective advocates for the youth they serve. iMentor Interactive provides iMentor’s proven model for all member organizations. Overcoming this barrier to entry is a prerequisite to a national mentoring movement.

The Quality Gap: At the same time, too many organizations currently running mentoring programs are not achieving the same results as iMentorNYC or other high-quality, high-impact mentoring programs. Too often, these organizations (especially non-mentoring organizations) do not invest the time, tools and resources to maximize the impact of mentoring relationships. Facilitating quality mentor-mentee matches around specific outcomes for the youth these programs serve is not an easy or simple process. iMentor has invested more than 10 years in developing and refining its mentoring model, its tools for supporting pairs and its tools for monitoring the efficacy of its mentor-mentee relationships. The iMentor model works. Every organization that wants to benefit from the power of mentoring should not have to figure these things out for themselves. iMentor Interactive provides a cost-effective and scalable solution for providing each member organization with all of the tools, best-practices, curricula, resources and ongoing support necessary for running high-quality mentoring programs. A “teach to fish” model, through intensive partnership, iMentor Interactive can assure these mentoring programs are maximizing the impact of each mentoring relationship. iMentor Interactive can build a community among member organizations all over the country, bringing practitioners together to learn from one another and providing data and evaluation to strengthen the broader mentoring community.

iMentor Interactive’s role is to work in partnership with member organizations to assure every member runs a high-quality, high-impact mentoring program. Every member of the iMentor Interactive staff is a mentoring expert--collecting best practices and innovations from existing research, iMentorNYC & other iMi members--iMi staff provides each member with all of the knowledge, tools and ongoing support necessary for effective program execution. In order to achieve this goal, iMi staff provides:

  - Comprehensive screening to assure new iMi members have the capacity for success

  - Comprehensive program design, planning and onboarding to assure successful program launch.

  - Collecting and providing access to resources that will enhance member programming, from cost-effective background checks to program curricula & training materials.

  - Providing timely and ongoing technology & programmatic support to navigate challenges members face.

  - Establish success metrics with each member, monitor progress toward achieving those goals, review goals at the end of each year and use data to inform potential changes to the program or the partnership.

  - Foster a sense of shared mission among all iMi members, including creating a conversation around constant learning, innovation and the sharing of best practices.

Through partnerships with member organizations all over the country, iMentor Interactive will give back to the broader mentoring community by sharing learning lessons, best practices and becoming an advocate for mentoring in federal and local conversations.

In recent years, iMentor NYC received frequent requests from organizations around the world looking to add iMentor's innovative mentoring model to their programming. In 2004, in response to this demand, iMentor began the development of a new e-mentoring solution (iMentor Interactive) which will allow any organization to:

(1) Easily start a mentoring program
(2) Enhance an existing mentoring program
(3) Build alumni or peer-to-peer mentoring networks