Who can be a mentor?

An effective mentor must have a positive attitude towards youth, understand the value of the mentoring experience for youth, and be ready to foster a meaningful relationship with their mentee. Mentors and youth should develop a connection that is established by trust, friendship, and empathy. Effective mentors will:

• Talk with youth instead of at them. Many mentors describe their approach to talking with youth as low-key or an equitable style of conversation.
• Offer encouragement and role modeling. Through working together, youth and mentors can problem-solve and collaborate. Mentors share their skills, knowledge, and expertise, and they are willing to learn alongside youth.
• Put in the time. Mentors and youth who spend time together on a consistent basis over long periods of time can create lasting bonds.

You can find mentors within your library staff, the youth themselves, and members of your community.

Library Staff as Mentors

Youth librarians can mentor youth by including encouraging lifelong learning, demonstrating what libraries can offer, and facilitating participation in the community.

“My primary way of interacting with teenagers is remembering that I’m not their teacher, I’m not their parent. I am someone who’s older, who may have more life experience, but I’m someone to help facilitate what they wanna do… There are a lot of different ways that you can successfully interact with teenagers as a librarian, but a lot of it really depends on your personal style.”

– Staff member at an urban western library

Academic assistance that supports school projects

“… we offer Capstone support every week for anyone who needs assistance with their Capstone. We also have mentors here… we’re working individually with youth on making sure that they’re on task with their Capstones.”

— Youth librarian at an urban northeastern library

Library staff can support teens through programs designed to increase academic success and prepare for life after high school. At an urban northeastern library, youth librarians and teen mentors collaborate to support the local high school’s senior capstone project.

Facilitating access to outside mentors and resources

By providing access to mentors from the community, library staff are able to help teens develop career and personal interests and expand expertise beyond family and friends. At the Providence Public Library, youth interested in fashion and art connected with design educators and students from a local college. By making these connections the teens didn’t just learn about careers in fashion, but they were also able to share their excitement with others who were similarly passionate.

Digital media mentors

“If a teen comes to one of us and say ‘I want to do this thing’ and if none of us know how to do it, we sit down and we figure out how to do it together whether it be trying to find information in the book, looking up a tutorial on YouTube, reaching out to maybe another mentor or someone else in our life, who might know what’s going on.”

– Teen Librarian at a suburban northeastern library

Library staff can help young people navigate our digital world. New technology like 3D printers or advanced concepts like coding can be intimidating, and library staff can encourage youth to experiment and explore, or collaborate and work through problems with them.

Youth as Mentors

Peer mentors acquire leadership skills through their interactions with others of their own age. Teens can mentor each other as they build skills related to an academic topic, or expand their knowledge of esports, music, and DJing. Teens who act as peer mentors bring another level of trust to the relationship - since youth are of similar ages - and can expand library capacity in mentoring about topics that are of particular interest to them.

Teens can develop into mentors by “geeking out” with the library’s resources

“… He was a teen and then he graduated to what we call Geek Status and now he’s teaching other teens how to use the [recording] studio.”

— Teen Librarian at a suburban northeastern library

Some libraries have trained high school students to operate and teach technology in library makerspaces or studios, which may include 3D printers, tablets, and design software. Library staff can encourage teens to “geek out” by learning about teen interests and skills and designing with those teens services that empower them to mentor and coach others in the community.

College student mentorship programs

Local colleges and universities can be a source of mentors for young people. Students may receive volunteer experience or fulfill a class project. A youth librarian at an eastern library found that their mentorship program with the local college helped their youth community improve their school performance and prepare for college.

Teens can help with or even design programming for other youth

“They’re collaborating and creating this program themselves, and I’m just kind of in the background.”

— Youth Services Coordinator at an urban midwestern library

A youth services coordinator described how her teen advisory board helped develop an Engineering and Physics Intro program for younger kids. Teens were encouraged to engage in community service that suited their interests and inspired other teens to consider STEM fields.

Community Members as Mentors

We will be renovating our library garden this next summer. The local garden club will be actively involved in that project, and we are calling the space our outdoor classroom. This could be a chance to do lots of mentoring.

- Sonya Harsha, ConnectedLib partner, Algona (IA) Public Library

Libraries have a longstanding tradition of connecting youth to community members, often for help with job seeking, technology training, or career development.

Connecting youth with experts in the community

“I have a retired teacher that comes to the Maker Club almost every week because she’s so interested in it. So I look for adults that have kind of a proven track record working with kids as well as some sort of interesting expertise that I or one of the other staff members is not able provide…”

— Youth Services Librarian at a rural western library

One youth services librarian found that her local community was “…rich in terms of artists, writers, and scientists.” She brought youth and adults together “…so that kids can meet adults that they may not meet at school or through their families.”

Connecting young people with local organizations

I see these organizations as resources for mentors because many of the volunteers are there because they already want to share their expertise. Think about skills that you would want to mentor young people in and see how that leads you to the mentors.

– Sonya Harsha, ConnectedLib partner, Algona (IA) Public Library

A special collections librarian at an urban northeastern library partnered with their local preservation and historical society in a program where adults mentored students in the design of a digital neighborhood profile. Teens explored map design and history, while mentors assisted with “…. hands-on work, and a lot of time spent asking them to sort of critically engage in the built environment around them.” Mentors also helped young people reflect on the design process, asking them “… how do you make meaning for somebody else by creating this digital tool?”

Supporting specific youth populations

An ALA diversity award winner, Lori Wilcox, developed the “Male-2-Male Mentoring” program. In the program, African American men spoke to African American tweens and teens. The male mentors were policemen, firemen, and pastors. They discussed real world topics like financial literacy, the competitive work force, unemployment, and what to do when pulled over by the police.

At the Pasadena Public Library, teens and library staff came up with ideas for supporting youth facing mental illness, including libraries sponsoring “…a mentoring program where teens can talk with adults about living with mental illness.”

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