Launch of the Vermont Mentoring Surveys!

Mobius is excited to announce the launch of the Vermont Mentoring Surveys, a new evaluation tool for youth mentoring programs across the state!

During the design phase of the Vermont Mentoring Database, Mobius and the Vermont Mentoring Funders Collaborative convened a committee of experienced mentoring staff from around the state to develop a common survey system for evaluating youth mentor pairs in Vermont. This group developed questions by analyzing existing evaluation resources, including the Search Institute’s “Developmental Assets,” MENTOR’s “Elements of Effective Practice,” and surveys from Vermont mentoring programs serving a diverse range of populations and age groups.

The committee also developed four different survey types—teacher/counselor, parent/guardian, mentor, and mentee—to ensure that the information programs gather is inclusive of the perspectives of all adults connected to the youth, as well as of the mentee him or herself. In order to illustrate the effects the mentoring relationship has on the youth over time, each survey type includes three versions: Pre-Match (prior to the mentoring relationship), During Match (intended to be taken repeatedly at yearly or biannual intervals), and Exit (as a part of the match closure process).

When Mobius became Vermont’s Mentoring Partnership in 2013, we shared the surveys that this group developed with Amy Carmola, an evaluation expert from the United Way of Chittenden County, to get feedback and to ensure that the data collected within them would be empirically viable. These surveys represent the hard work of many mentoring supporters across the state, and 2014 marks the official launch of this statewide survey system. Mobius has worked with CiviCore to incorporate the surveys into the Vermont Mentoring Database, with the hope that programs can have a tool to help better evaluate their own mentor pairs, and that Mobius and our funding partners can begin gathering aggregate data around the state of mentoring in Vermont.

We encourage you to read the Vermont Mentoring Survey Toolkit, which provides recommendations on how to administer the surveys, where to find them online, and how full users of the Vermont Mentoring Database can make use of them from within the system.

If you have any questions related to the surveys or how to access them, please contact us at [email protected] or 802-658-1888.