SAYes Mentoring
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Mission Statement
To inspire and inform leaders of social change through mentoring
About This Cause
Background SAYes Mentoring was founded in 2008 to improve personal, social and employment outcomes for under-served young people through mentoring. We partner with community-based organisations, high schools, sport for development programmes, child and youth care centres, corporates and Local Authorities throughout South Africa and the UK, providing the young people aged 14-29 in their programmes, as they transition to independent living, with nine months of one-to one remote mentorship. The Need Formal mentorships, especially for under-served young people, have been shown to improve outcomes across a range of areas relevant to a young person’s independence, well-being and social development. These include a more positive vision of themselves and their future, positive schooling outcomes, workplace placement and retention, and a range of positive impacts on the community and peer groups in which they interact. The under-served young people in our programmes face not only material inequalities, but also segregation and oppression which has resulted in considerable social poverty. This entails a poverty of perspective, of social capital and of secure social bonds which impact the quality of decision making and healthy practices among young people. This is especially problematic during adolescence, where such disadvantages compound the challenge of rapid developmental changes, and set behavioural pathways long into the future. The resultant instability in housing and family relationships, in educational attainment, and in risk behaviour (including crime and drug taking) can further destabilise communities already fragile due to unreliable, inadequate or expensive infrastructure (e.g., water, sanitation, transport, digital access, informal economies, unemployment) and high levels of physical and mental health burden. This vulnerability is especially stark for young people facing significant life transitions, like the transition from high school into tertiary study or employment. In this context, many young people leave education with poor skills and poor career decision making and are at the same time ill-equipped to navigate the complex social structures that determine access to employment. This transition also takes place at a time when young people age out of the social protection they may have accessed when they were younger. Many fall out of the social and economic systems entirely. Young NEETs then become especially vulnerable and at risk of long term economic and social exclusion during their transition into adulthood. How We Meet This Need At SAYes we design, deliver and support mentorships for under-served young people. We recruit, screen and train volunteer mentors, who are individually matched with a same self-identified gender mentee and are supported throughout their mentorship by our transition support staff. Mentors and mentees meet for one hour a week for nine months, providing guidance, advocacy and support in the context of transition planning and behavioural design. Mentorship meetings take place remotely (WhatsApp Video call), and we provide cell phones and a weekly data allowance to all mentees in our programmes. During weekly meetings mentors and mentees work through a transition planning and implementation process focusing on goals across these ten domains: education & learning, home & family, community & citizenship, work & money, sport & recreation; in addition to physical health, social health, identity health, emotional health and cognitive health. Each match is assigned a Transition Specialist, who provides extensive support to the mentors and mentees throughout the nine month contract. This support involves formal Individual Transition Plan (ITP) meetings, interventions, and match resourcing through access to information, experiential opportunities (e.g., job shadowing), and where appropriately vetted, material/resource support (e.g., transport, scholarships, food parcels). “One recent study showed that every dollar invested in quality youth mentoring programs yields a $3 return in benefits to society at a minimum” David Shapiro, President and CEO, MENTOR (USA). Our Impact Our primary objectives are improvements in independence and well-being, measured through improvements in the quality of decision making and the consistency of healthy practices. Additional impact measures include a selection of psychometric indicators (e.g., executive function and emotion regulation) as well as community level indicators (school attendance, drop out, grade progression, drug use, unplanned pregnancy, and conflict with the law). In collaboration with the Children’s Institute at the University of Cape Town and Queen’s University Belfast, we have carried out a rigorous evaluation of the impact of our programmes, demonstrating significant improvements in decision making and healthy practices across all ten domains. We have published on our transition to remote mentoring, due to Covid-19, in order to share knowledge and insight with community organisations and other non-profits whose programming was affected by the pandemic.