Help Mentors Plan Impactful Match Activities
Mentoring Central’s Building Assets Together (BAT) Guide is designed to directly address the recurring request of mentors for effective, useful suggestions of things to do with their mentees by providing them with a resource that contains a curated springboard of ideas of possible match activities.
A person-centered, asset-based approach to mentoring.
A person-centered, asset-based approach to mentoring.
This resource uses a person-centered, asset-based approach to mentoring to support match goals and foster positive outcomes for mentees. The BAT Guide includes suggestions for ways mentors can consider and incorporate their mentees’ individual needs, background, goals, interests, and strengths when planning activities to do with their mentee. This resource also provides guidance to help mentors identify their mentees’ personal assets or strengths and then, try to strengthen or grow these assets during their day-to-day interactions.
Guidance for growth across the life of the mentoring relationship.
Many mentoring programs, especially school- or afterschool site-based programs, are designed to last approximately a school year of nine to 10 months. Thus, the BAT Guide was designed to follow the lifecycle of an approximately 10-month-long mentoring relationship, hence there are 10 main topics. Mentors and mentoring programs can spend as little as a week on a topic or as much time as they like until they think that they have adequately addressed the goals associated with the topic.
Each of the 10 core topics provides strategies and suggestions for activities to help mentors meet specific mentoring relationship goals or “assets” that may help mentors and mentoring program staff assess and drive growth in mentees. Topics in this Guide are organized to provide mentors with strategies to meet their goals during each several of the stages that occur across the life of a mentoring relationship:
- Initiation: This stage occurs when a mentor and mentee begin a mentoring relationship and start to get to know each other.
- Growth and Maintenance: During this stage of a mentoring relationship, mentors and mentees have gotten to know one another, but they are still continuing to build their relationship, while focusing their activities on helping mentees achieve their academic or personal goals.
- Closure: At this stage in the mentoring relationship, matches have reached a time when they need to plan and end their participation in the program. Alternatively, programs may allow matches to continue to meet beyond the originally agreed upon length of the program, requiring everyone to redefine the mentoring relationship.
10 topics with purposeful and fun suggestions for activities to do with a mentee.
Initiation
Get acquainted
Getting to know and learning about your mentee.
Do fun activities together
Establishing your mentoring relationship by being consistent and dependable.
Goal setting
Helping your mentee set tangible goals for themselves that you can work towards as a team.
Growth and Maintenance
Fostering gratitude
Understanding the importance of gratitude.
Prepare for an upcoming event or holidays
Preparing for upcoming holidays to decrease stress and build healthy expectations.
Practice making positive healthy decisions
Practicing making positive healthy decisions in small ways.
Increase school engagement
Supporting your mentee in school and their interests.
Increase civic engagement
Exposing your mentee to the important ways they can contribute to their community.
Build positive peer friendships
Modeling a positive friendship between you and your mentee.
Closure
Prepare to end the mentoring relationship in a healthy and growth-fostering way
Closing the relationship in a healthy and growth-fostering way.
Features
- Downloadable and printable PDF Guide
- Research-informed content
- Diverse, goal-oriented activity suggestions for each stage of the mentoring relationship
- Suggested conversation-starters and talking points to foster impactful conversations between mentors and mentees
- Sections for note-taking
