Our Mentoring Model

Developed to ensure every mentoring relationship is consistently impactful, the iMentor model ensures more students from underserved communities graduate high school college-ready and succeed in college.  This model is based on four key components:

More Mentors  |  More Effective  |  Whole-School  |  iMentor Interactive

More Mentors

A fundamental question for most mentoring programs is: how to recruit more mentors?  iMentor's model was designed to address this challenge. 

Traditional mentoring models essentially exclude almost everybody who has the time and willingness to devote to mentoring but needs more flexibility in that commitment.  iMentor's solution was to create a more flexible mentoring model without sacrificing the level rigor required for effective mentoring:

• Mentors email their mentee once a week
• Pairs meet in-person once a month
• Mentors still devote 6-8 hours a month to their mentee, but can do so within their own schedule

More Effective

Mentoring plays a unique role in the developmental and educational experience of our mentees.  In fact, in certain areas, often described as "non-classroom" or experiential competencies linked to academic success, mentors have the potential to be more effective than teachers, parents, or peers.  These areas include:

• Making connections between school and work
• Building social capital skills
• Developing a greater capacity for resilience, communication, and critical thinking

At the same time, there are also challenges inherent to mentoring.  First, mentors are not necessarily education or youth development experts.  And second, for a mentoring relationship to be successful, it needs to be reliable and consistent.  iMentor's model addresses these challenges by:

• Providing a research-informed curriculum and competencies checklist for pairs to work through, ensuring each interaction is meaningful and intentional
• Providing each mentor personalized and targeted support and extensive training to ensure they are effective in their roles

Whole-School Partnerships

iMentor's model facilitates deep partnerships with schools in New York City.  iMentor partners with schools to enroll every single student in the school with a mentor, eliminating self-selection among students, and providing mentors to serve as one-on-one personal, college, and career support resource for the student. This results in multiple benefits:

• High school graduation and college success become an expectation:  What students learn and experience with their mentors gets into peer-to-peer conversations and classroom discussions, positively impacting school culture
• Augment high school guidance and college counseling programs: in-school guidance programs are often under-resourced.  iMentor provides every single student in a school with one-on-one support from a caring adult.
• Students' perspectives broaden: by involving mentors from outside the students' communities, iMentor facilitates students being better informed about future options and experiences in communities other than their own.

iMentor Interactive

Since its founding in 1999, iMentor has developed a mentoring model that incorporates the best practices, curriculum, and tools to deliver rigorous, reliable, and consistent mentoring to youth.  In order to meet the acute need for mentoring nationwide, iMentor partners with non-profits and schools through iMentor Interactive to provide them with everything they need to run high quality mentoring programs in the iMentor model, including:

• Multi-year, structured, research-informed mentoring curriculum
• Online platform for managing all aspects of the mentoring program
• Intensive consulting and partnership services

iMentor Interactive partners include KIPP, Junior Achievement, Bridgeport Public Schools, Admission Possible, SingleStop, and City Year.