Mentorship programs — Big Brothers, Big Sisters

Ernest Coulter was a court clerk at the New York Children's Court when he gave a speech to the Men's Club of the Central Presbyterian Church in December 1904. He had watched boys cycle through the court — pickpockets, truants, runaways — and noticed that almost none of them had an adult man in their lives who was both stable and interested. His proposal was that each member of the club take one boy. Within a year, ninety boys had been matched. The Ladies of Charity, working with Catholic girls in similar straits, started a parallel program. By 1977, the two had merged into Big Brothers Big Sisters of America. The founding diagnosis — that boys appearing in court were boys without fathers in any functional sense, and that the solution was substitution rather than rehabilitation — preceded all the modern theory and remains, empirically, the heart of the matter.

The 1995 Public/Private Ventures study is the document that turned BBBS from a beloved charity into an evidence-based intervention. Joseph Tierney and Jean Grossman randomly assigned 959 youth, ages ten to sixteen, who had applied to eight BBBS affiliates between 1991 and 1993. Half were matched within a few months. Half were waitlisted for eighteen months and served as controls. The outcomes — drug initiation, alcohol initiation, hitting, school attendance, grades, family relationships — were measured at baseline and at eighteen months. The matched group showed the differences cited above. The study is not perfect: the sample was largely urban, the follow-up was short, and the controls eventually got matched. But it is one of fewer than a hundred randomized trials of a community-based youth intervention ever conducted in the United States, and it produced positive findings on outcomes that matter.

David DuBois, working with colleagues at the University of Illinois at Chicago, published a 2002 meta-analysis in the American Journal of Community Psychology covering fifty-five mentoring program evaluations. The pooled effect size was 0.18 — small in absolute terms, meaningful given the modest dose. More importantly, the analysis identified moderators. Programs with strong implementation — ongoing training, structured activities, parental involvement, monitoring of matches — produced effects up to three times larger than programs without those features. The follow-up meta-analysis in 2011 confirmed and extended these findings. The lesson: mentoring is not a magic relationship that works regardless of context. It is a fragile relationship that program design either protects or undermines.

Jean Rhodes's work has been the most disciplined attempt to figure out when mentoring helps and when it hurts. Her analyses of the BBBS data and subsequent studies showed that matches lasting less than three months were associated with declines in youth-reported self-worth and academic competence. Matches that lasted twelve months or longer showed the largest gains. The mechanism is intuitive: a child who has already experienced adult abandonment and is paired with a volunteer who then abandons them learns the lesson once more, this time with the program's endorsement. Rhodes's policy recommendation is that programs should refuse to match volunteers who cannot credibly commit to a year. Many programs ignore this advice because the supply of mentors is limited and the queue of children is long.

Volunteer mentoring operates on trust, and trust is hard to verify in advance. Background checks catch criminal records; they do not catch boundary issues, instability, or the volunteer who is using the relationship to satisfy their own needs. BBBS affiliates have refined screening over decades — multiple interviews, reference checks, home visits, training modules — but the residual risk is real. The 1990s saw several high-profile abuse cases that pushed the organization toward more rigorous protocols and the now-standard practice of requiring meetings in public places during the first year. The tightening reduced incidents and also reduced the volunteer pool. A program that screens carelessly produces casualties. A program that screens rigorously produces shortages. Both are real costs.

The original BBBS model was community-based: the volunteer picked the activities, the meetings happened wherever they happened, the relationship was as unstructured as friendship. In the 1990s, BBBS introduced site-based mentoring, often in schools, where the meetings were once a week during lunch or after school and the activities were more constrained. The site-based model is cheaper to supervise, easier to recruit for, and produces smaller effects. The community-based model is harder to scale and produces the larger effects from the original study. The tradeoff is not resolvable in the abstract. A program in a region with few volunteers and many children may rationally choose the smaller-effect, larger-reach model. A program prioritizing impact per match should choose otherwise.

For decades, BBBS matched along racial lines when possible, on the assumption that cross-race matches would underperform. Rhodes and others tested this empirically and found the assumption largely false: cross-race matches produced comparable outcomes when the volunteer was prepared to discuss race honestly and when the match lasted long enough. The current consensus is that match longevity and quality matter more than racial concordance. This finding cuts against a common intuition and is therefore underappreciated. It also has practical consequences: insisting on racial matching in a country where Black men are recruited as mentors at much lower rates than white women either produces long waitlists for Black boys or extends matches across race that work fine.

Most mentoring research focuses on the child. A smaller literature follows the adult. Volunteers report increased life satisfaction, expanded social networks, and a sense of purpose that survives the match. They also report frustration, helplessness in the face of poverty they cannot fix, and grief when matches end. The adult who shows up weekly for a child living in a chaotic household learns things about American life that no policy paper conveys. Some volunteers become advocates as a result. Others burn out. The program is, among other things, a civic education for the volunteer, which may be one of its underrated functions at the collective scale.

BBBS national reports annual program costs of roughly $1,000 to $1,500 per match per year, primarily for staff who recruit, screen, train, and supervise. Compared to the cost of a single juvenile detention bed-day, this is trivial. Compared to the marginal cost of after-school programming or tutoring, it is competitive. Compared to the structural changes — housing stability, parental employment, neighborhood safety — that would reduce the need for mentoring in the first place, it is a rounding error. Funders like mentoring because it is cheap per child and measurable. The cheapness and measurability are also why it tends to attract investment that might otherwise have gone to harder structural work.

The Plan Law warns against confusing a substitute for the original. A mentor is not a parent. A weekly bowling outing is not a household. A trained volunteer can interrupt a trajectory; they cannot replace the daily, ambient, unconditional presence of a committed adult. Programs that overstate what mentoring can do — that promise transformed lives from two hours a week — set up disappointment for funders, volunteers, and children alike. Programs that state the modest, real claim — that an additional consistent adult, sustained over years, slightly improves the odds on several outcomes — earn their place. The slightly is not a failure. It is the truth.

Mentoring works best when it is not the only thing. The child with a mentor, a stable school, a coach, a clergy member, a grandparent across town, and a neighbor who watches the street is a child with a web. The child with only the mentor is a child with a single thread. Programs that operate in neighborhoods with thick civic life amplify what is already there. Programs that operate in neighborhoods stripped of institutions are doing harder work with less ambient support. The collective question is not how to scale mentoring. It is how to rebuild the conditions under which mentoring is one component of a fabric, not the whole fabric.

A serious society would fund BBBS at a scale that eliminated waitlists for children who want a mentor, while simultaneously addressing the conditions — parental incarceration, housing instability, neighborhood violence, school underfunding — that produce the demand. It would treat the volunteer recruitment problem as a civic challenge worth solving, perhaps through tax credits for sustained volunteer hours or workplace-supported release time. It would measure outcomes honestly and refuse to celebrate match counts as a proxy for impact. And it would keep asking, year after year, why so many children need a stranger to show up.

1. Tierney, Joseph P., Jean Baldwin Grossman, and Nancy L. Resch. Making a Difference: An Impact Study of Big Brothers Big Sisters. Philadelphia: Public/Private Ventures, 1995.

2. Rhodes, Jean E. Stand by Me: The Risks and Rewards of Mentoring Today's Youth. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002.

3. DuBois, David L., Bruce E. Holloway, Jeffrey C. Valentine, and Harris Cooper. "Effectiveness of Mentoring Programs for Youth: A Meta-Analytic Review." American Journal of Community Psychology 30, no. 2 (2002): 157–197.

4. DuBois, David L., Nelson Portillo, Jean E. Rhodes, Naida Silverthorn, and Jeffrey C. Valentine. "How Effective Are Mentoring Programs for Youth? A Systematic Assessment of the Evidence." Psychological Science in the Public Interest 12, no. 2 (2011): 57–91.

5. Grossman, Jean Baldwin, and Jean E. Rhodes. "The Test of Time: Predictors and Effects of Duration in Youth Mentoring Relationships." American Journal of Community Psychology 30, no. 2 (2002): 199–219.

6. Rhodes, Jean E., and David L. DuBois. "Mentoring Relationships and Programs for Youth." Current Directions in Psychological Science 17, no. 4 (2008): 254–258.

7. Beiswinger, George L. One to One: The Story of the Big Brothers/Big Sisters Movement in America. Philadelphia: Big Brothers/Big Sisters of America, 1985.

8. Herrera, Carla, Jean Baldwin Grossman, Tina J. Kauh, and Jennifer McMaken. Mentoring in Schools: An Impact Study of Big Brothers Big Sisters School-Based Mentoring. Philadelphia: Public/Private Ventures, 2007.

9. Rhodes, Jean E. Older and Wiser: New Ideas for Youth Mentoring in the 21st Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020.

10. Spencer, Renée. "Naturally Occurring Mentoring Relationships Involving Youth." In Handbook of Youth Mentoring, 2nd ed., edited by David L. DuBois and Michael J. Karcher, 211–225. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2014.

11. Karcher, Michael J. "The Effects of Developmental Mentoring and High School Mentors' Attendance on Their Younger Mentees' Self-Esteem, Social Skills, and Connectedness." Psychology in the Schools 42, no. 1 (2005): 65–77.

12. Putnam, Robert D. Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2015.