Ethics & Safety
Prepare mentors to make safe, ethical decisions before difficult situations arise.
The Ethics & Safety course gives mentors a practical framework for navigating boundaries, confidentiality, safety concerns, commitments, fairness, and other ethical decisions that arise in everyday mentoring relationships.
It helps mentors prepare for ethical and safety issues before they face them so they can be confident in their decisions.
Why Ethics & Safety Training Matters
Just as ethical guidelines are crucial in other professions (doctors, lawyers, psychologists), they are equally fundamental to successful mentoring relationships.
In this course, mentors encounter a series of everyday situations that require making decisions to protect their mentee’s safety. Using a code of ethics helps mentors make decisions that will protect both the mentor and the mentee from uncomfortable and problematic situations that can jeopardize their relationship.
Six Principles for Safe, Ethical Mentoring
Ethics & Safety teaches mentors key decision-making skills.
Total training time is about 45 minutes.
Prevent harm
Recognize situations that could put the mentee or relationship at risk.
Promote the mentee’s well-being
Put the young person’s interests at the center of decisions.
Be trustworthy and responsible
Keep commitments and behave consistently.
Act with integrity
Communicate honestly and avoid creating false expectations.
Promote fairness and justice
Recognize bias and use one’s influence responsibly.
Respect the rights and dignity of youth and families
Honor appropriate confidentiality, autonomy, and family roles.
Designed to complement your program’s risk-management policies and procedures
Ethics & Safety teaches mentors a general framework for ethical decision-making. Your organization’s orientation and policies provide the specific rules mentors must follow.
Training that fits your mentoring model
Self-paced, 45-minute online course
- Downloadable resources
- Certificate of Completion
Choose the version designed for your program:
Community-Based | Site-Based
Course Features
- Guided self-reflection activities
- Authentic videos that illustrate real-world scenarios
- Interactive learning activities that encourage participation
- Research-based content grounded in the science of effective mentoring
- Practice-informed guidance reflecting the realities mentors encounter
- Tipsheets and resources for ongoing reference
- Certificate to recognize course completion and knowledge gain
Case Study: With the Preparing for Mentoring program, BEST Kids achieves higher than average results for matches.
The challenge:
The BEST Kids mentoring program needed a comprehensive set of tools that were easy to administer and monitor for preparing their mentors to be committed, dependable, ethical, safe, and efficacious in their mentoring relationships.
The solution:
BEST Kids uses Mentoring Central’s Preparing for Mentoring series, including the Ethics & Safety course, to help volunteers understand their roles and responsibilities and build relationships grounded in realistic expectations, respect, and appropriate boundaries.
The result:
With comprehensive training and ongoing support, BEST Kids reports that its matches last an average of 2–2.5 years, with only about 5% ending in less than a year.
“I think what’s really good about the Mentoring Central training is that it provides those scenarios to helping mentors assess what they should do and moments where they’re really not sure about these things. And, seeing that visually, really helps people to grasp a real concept of what mentoring looks like.”
– Carl C. Scott, Independent Mentoring Consultant
