More than 3,000 youth are on waiting lists for mentors in Massachusetts. At the same time, youth mentoring programs tell Mass Mentoring Partnership that recruiting mentors of color is critically important - and a major challenge.

In response, and armed with 18 months of groundwork, including the ability to leverage promising recruitment-related practices from local mentoring programs and national initiatives at the forefront of the issue, MMP launched our Mentors of Color recruitment campaign in 2009.

Additional research from Mass Mentoring Counts, the biennial survey of youth mentoring, shows that of the approximately 17,000 youths between the ages of 5 and 19 who have mentors, 63 percent are Latino or African-American, while 75 percent of current mentors are Caucasian.

We know that creating a powerful relationship between a mentor and mentee is based on many factors, including shared interests, life experiences and the ability to relate to each other. Research has shown that commonalities in racial and ethnic background can be a central ingredient in forming mentoring bonds.

With seed funding from the Fieldstone Foundation in 2008, we began planning the Mentors of Color campaign to specifically target the increased recruitment of mentors of color and the enhanced cultural competency of mentoring programs.

Official campaign program partners:

Media Sponsors: