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Operations

Program Operations includes resources to help you effectively recruit mentors for your program; ensure mentors are appropriately screened and trained to fulfill their roles and meet program expectations; match mentors with mentees' using pre-established criteria and keep your mentors informed, motivated and supported.

Operations

The America Learns Network

Designed in partnership with more than 300 tutoring and mentoring stakeholders nationwide, the Network simultaneously accelerates OST programs reporting and tutor and mentor support efforts.

Recruitment


	Attracting Volunteers This document is an overview of a MENTOR Online Forum--"Attracting and Connecting Volunteers." This ongoing forum shares resources and best practices for recruiting mentors from the general public and the business sector for school and community based programs. Forum speakers included representatives from YouthFriends, The Mentoring Partnership of Minnesota and The Mentoring Partnership of Long Island.
	Beyond Recruitment: An Online Workshop About Recruitment & Maintaining Volunteers An Online Workshop About Recruitment & Maintaining Volunteers in the New Environment (Course Manual)
	Changing Work Patterns Search for volunteers who have odd working patterns. More and more people work during non-traditional working hours, so a volunteer agency needs to change their schedule in order to recruit this working group.
	Decide Needed Roles and Set Recruitment Goals With the scope, goals, and strategies of your effort already in place, you can now decide what roles are required and determine the number of marketing representatives you will recruit for each role.
	Effective Mentor Recruitment: Getting Organized, Getting Results This publication offers many worksheets, planning tools, and strategies for diversifying recruitment and developing recruitment campaigns.
	Finding Daytime Volunteers It is not difficult to locate volunteers during the daytime. Recruit middle-aged, students and people who do not work normal working hours.
	Making the Most of Volunteers How to make the most out of your volunteers
	Marketing for the Recruitment of Mentors: A Guide to Finding and Attracting Volunteers This resource applies marketing strategies to volunteer recruitment, examining strategies for developing effective ads, creating brand equity, testing marketing messages, and exploring the wide variety of print and broadcast media available to local programs.
	Mentor Recruitment Postcards The Mentor Recruitment Postcard will allow you to increase your pool of mentors and will also help your agency gain greater visibility in the community.
	Mobile Volunteers Every volunteer program deals to some degree with seasonal leaves of absence, whether for summer or winter. Some volunteers may be flattered and intrigued by the idea that you'd like them to stay involved, even at a distance.
	Online Volunteer Resources Virtual volunteering allows agencies to expand the benefits of their volunteer programs, by allowing for more volunteers to participate, and by utilizing volunteers in new areas.
	Recruiting Male Volunteers: A Basic Guide on Exploratory Research Stephanie Blackman, a former AmeriCorp*VISTA member, seeks to strengthen the service field through a better understanding of male volunteering in the social services. She has assessed factors that increase male volunteering in service programs.
	Recruitment and Retention at VolunteerToday.com Ideas, suggestions and hints to build volunteer recruitment capacity.
	Recruitment Insights Several resources to help programs seek volunteers and new ideas to freshen up your approach.
	Recruitment Maxims We simply must begin to think and act like marketing experts and approach the challenge of recruitment as a golden opportunity to educate the public about our cause, generate excitement about our organization, and discover the human riches of our communi
	Recruitment Tips for a Mentoring Program From the University of Minnesota Tips on how to develop a plan of action before the actual recruiting takes place.
	Targeted Mentoring Recruitment How to build a relationship with local organizations that can help with recruitment or implement strategies for making recruitment customer-friendly.
	The Virtual Volunteering Guidebook Provides detailed information on the basics of setting up and managing a successful virtual volunteering program.
	Volunteer Recruitment Campaigns by Steve McCurley This article discusses ways in which volunteer programs have approached the issue of recruitment, and concentrates on examining four different methods of planning recruitment campaigns.
	Volunteer Recruitment: Tips from the Field: Volunteer recruitment is one of the most commonly cited issues of concern by volunteer managers today.
	Your Circle of Resources: This article discusses the benefits of recruiting resources in cloest proximity to you.

Risk Management


	Child Sexual Abuse Risk Exposure Matrix Screening volunteers to prevent child sexual abuse: a community guide for youth organizations.
	Helping Nonprofits through Difficult Times By Pamela E. Davis - Insurance Journal Insurance availability for nonprofits with increasing costs of premium and cutbacks in donated funds.
	Mentoring Essentials: Risk Management for Mentoring Programs by Dustianne North and Jerry Sherk Includes information on: assessing risk; anticipating risk; strategizing to reduce risk; preparing participants for risk; troubleshooting problems and preventing crisis.
	Nonprofit Risk Management Center Publications Your nonprofit may be liable for injuries or accidents that occur within your rented space, and some, but not all, damages to the space you rent.
	Risk Management Brief: Federal Law Protects Nonprofit Volunteers Act reduces standard of liability to gross negligence, flagrant indifference
	Risk Management: Risk Management FAQs from Alliance for Nonprofit Management The site provides the frequently asked questions regarding risk managment, the development of a risk management program, how to avoid the affects of risk mangement, etc.
	Understanding the Volunteer Protection Act An unfortunate consequence of the states - volunteer immunity laws has been the creation of a false impression that volunteers are immune from lawsuits.
	Volunteer Protection Act of 1997 In 1997, President Clinton signed into law the Volunteer Protection Act of 1997 (Act) that, generally speaking, provides immunity from tort claims that might be filed against the volunteers of nonprofit organizations.
	Volunteer Risk Management Tutorial This free, on-line tutorial will help your organization manage the risks of using volunteers. It tests your knowledge about risk management and helps you improve practices you already have in place.
	Volunteering Is Inherently Risky Every organization must grapple with its own tolerance for risk. This article asks whether we are selling out volunteer potential by allowing fear of lawsuits to challenge our desired activities.

Screening / Background Checks


	Barriers to Preventing Abuse By John Patterson with Charles Tremper and Pam Rypkema from Child Abuse Prevention Primer for Your Organization
	Booklet Explains the Sign of Child Sexual Abuse PDF booklet helps parents, teachers and others spot and report child sexual abuse.
	Checking Criminal Histories: Considerations Before You Begin This articles explores some of the factors an organization should resolve prior to conducting criminal history record checks.
	Child Sexual Abuse Risk Exposure Matrix Child Abuse Risk Matrix
	National Sex Offender Registry Search Engine The Dru Sjodin National Sex Offender Public Registry, coordinated by the Department of Justice, is a cooperative effort between the state agencies hosting public sexual offender registries and the federal government. This web site is a search tool allowing a user to submit a single national query to obtain information about sex offenders through a number of search options.
	SafetyNET Background Check Service SafetyNET is a criminal background check for your volunteers. Get a full FBI check for $18, and results are delivered within 3-5 business days.
	Screening Volunteers Training module developed by The Mentoring Center outlining procedures for screening volunteers for programs depending on the type of program at hand.
	The U.S. Department of Education Mentoring Program's Guide to Screening and Background Checks A guidebook for developing a comprehensive screening process for volunteers.
	Volunteer Screening Excerpt from "Running a Safe and Effective Mentoring Program" The following chapter is an excerpt from the manual “Running a Safe and Effective Mentoring Program” written by Elsy Arévalo and Rebecca Cooper and published by the Friends for Youth Mentoring Institute.

Orientation and Training


	Building Relationships: A Guide for New Mentors This National Mentoring Center resource provides the framework for developing successful mentoring relationships.
	Designing and Customizing Mentor Training This training (PDF) will provide all of the necessary information to enable you to immediately begin to effectively prepare your mentors.
	EMT Online University EMT Online University provides California prevention program staff the opportunity to access one hour online mentoring and youth development trainings. Courses include: Promoting Positive Adolescent Development; Starting a Mentoring Program.
	Evaluation Management Training -- The Youth Development Approach: Looking for What Information on how to support youth development to enable teens to develop competencies that will help them succeed as adults.
	Foster Youth Mentorship Training for Program Managers, EMT Designed to assist programs who serve youth in foster care in interacting with the foster care system and supporting these youth throughout their mentoring relationships.
	Guide To Help Prepare Participants for Mentoring Guide to Initial Training of Volunteers, Youth, and Parents.
	Learn to Mentor Toolkit A downloadable Learn to Mentor toolkit which includes exercises, and tools for mentor trainings which will help them apply the ideas in this course to their own experiences.
	Mentor Guide for People Working With Children of Promise Guide for working with children of promise
	Mentor Trainer's Manual Originally developed by Baylor University to train college students to mentor young adolescents, the Community Mentoring for Adolescent Development (CMAD) manual (10.6 MB) has been revised and updated by MENTOR/National Mentoring Partnership. It is presented in full text and by chapter in PDF format and also in MSWord so you can choose a format that best fits your needs.
	Orient and Train Mentors - Serviceleader. Org Information on all aspects of volunteer management, including getting your organization ready to involve volunteers, volunteer screening, matching, record-keeping and evaluation.
	Preparing Parents for the Mentoring Journey Aside from the young person being mentored, parents are the primary stakeholders in the mentoring relationship. Yet sometimes parents do not clearly understand why their child has been referred to a mentoring program, what mentoring is all about, their role, and the roles of the mentor and program. Because parents play such an important function in the mentoring relationship some thought should be given to how we prepare them for the mentoring journey. This effective practice outlines sample language and ideas for preparing parents for the mentoring experience.
	Training New Mentees: A Manual For Preparing Youth in Mentoring Programs Training New Mentees

The Cyberbullying Toolkit for Tutors and Mentors

Developed by America Learns and Net-Generation expert Vanessa Van Petten.Offers steps volunteers can take to help mentees address online harassment, and provides guidance to school administrators, parents and guardians.

Matching


	Avoiding Early Match Termination Avoiding Early Match Termination
	Creating and Sustaining a Winning Match This training (PDF) will help you learn how to make a good match. Topics include building supervisory and supportive relationships with mentors, documenting mentor and mentee contacts and what should be monitored.
	Mentor Preference Form Helps track preferences and interests of the mentor for better matching with mentees.
	Mentoring and Diversity by Dr. Linda Phillips-Jones Issues regarding diversity and inclusion in mentoring relationships
	Questions Frequently Asked by Mentors Hear what various mentors ask all the time...along with typical responses. Maybe you have some of these questions on your mind.
	Same Race and Cross Race Matching Making Same Race and Cross Race Matching work

Support and Monitoring

Providing Summertime Contact in School-Based Mentoring Programs

One of the main challenges for school-based mentoring programs is keeping matches in touch over the summer break when extensive in-person meetings may not be possible. Research indicates that school-based mentoring relationships suffer when summer contact is absent. Luckily, there are several strategies available to school-based mentoring programs to keep matches engaged, minimize the negative impact of the summer break on relationship quality, and get matches ready to build on positive momentum when the school year starts back up.

Supporting Mentors

This National Mentoring Center resource provides guidance on successful support of mentoring relationships.

Recognition and Retention

Energizeinc.com - National Volunteer Week Ideas!

Ideas to recognize individuals who have made a difference in their communities.

Energizeinc.com - Volunteer Recognition

A selection of popular ways to recognize volunteers.

Activities


	A Year's Worth Of Mentoring Activities 52 ideas, one for each week of the year.
	Activity Ideas For Online Mentors And Mentees 63 online activities for online mentors and mentees to do together via e-mail and the web.
	College Tool Kit Online resources to understand the college process
	Cyberbullying Prevention Tools Cyberbullying Prevention Tools including worksheets, family activities and much more.
	Mentoring Resource Center FACT SHEET This Fact Sheet is a great resource for exploring research, best practices, and innovative strategies related to running U.S. Department of Education-sponsored mentoring programs.

Closure

Mentoring Relationships: Seven Tips For Coming To Closure

The closure phase of the mentoring relationship presents the greatest challenge to individuals involved in the partnership.