Chapter 5: Bridges and Barriers in Australia’s Youth Mentoring Programs

The literature on mentoring abounds with statements similar to the one above from Dondero’s article, Mentors: Beacons of Hope, Mentoring would appear to be universally espoused as a strategy, benefiting the mentees, mentors, and the communities or organizations participating in the mentoring programs.

Although mentoring has been gaining popularity in Australia in recent years, it is not yet a mass movement. A majority of mentoring programs are still developed at the grassroots level by individuals and organizations in order to meet the specific needs of particular groups of young people.

These programs use mentoring as a strategy for enhancing young people’s knowledge and skills, and their personal, social, or career outcomes. A few formal mentoring programs began appearing in the late 1970s, but it was not until the late 1990s that mentoring gained any prominence. By that time, the term “mentoring” was appearing more often in program titles, and more people in the education and youth sectors were seeking out information about the benefits of mentoring and how to successfully develop and implement a mentoring program.