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SUMMARY
Mentoring programs for youth have become immensely popular in recent years. Evaluations of their effectiveness, however, have yielded mixed results. These findings underscore a need for more careful and in-depth scrutiny of programmatic features that are necessary for mentoring relationships to provide intended benefits to youth. Utilizing a novel, participatory research perspective, this paper considers the author's own experiences as a mentor of a 9-year-old boy and their relation to a set of program best practices identified in a recent meta-analysis of the literature (DuBois, Holloway, Valentine, & Cooper, in press). A framework for efforts to enhance mentoring program effectiveness is described.
