Community Mentoring & Student Support Innovation Lab
Funder: The Partnership for Student Success & Leon Lowenstein Foundation
Scope of Work: This Lab will bring partners together to define what high-quality, evidence-based mentoring and student support look like in our community, identify gaps and overlaps, and develop practical strategies for strengthening alignment across systems. Youth from Fact Forward’s Youth Leadership Council will serve as co-facilitators, ensuring youth voice shapes both the process and outcomes. Funding supports planning and facilitation, human-centered design activities, staff coordination, and the creation of a publicly available toolkit. This work will also lay the groundwork for a stronger mentoring infrastructure in North and South Carolina, where no MENTOR National Affiliate currently exists, by identifying needs and shared standards that could support future statewide efforts.
Project Goals:
- Convene 15–25 stakeholders to co-create a shared definition of high-quality mentoring and student support and document agreed-upon core practices in the toolkit.
- Identify 3–5 concrete ways career-connected learning can be integrated into mentoring and support roles and provide step-by-step implementation guidance.
- Produce a toolkit with stakeholder mapping tools, convening guides, mentoring standards, career-connected learning strategies, and planning worksheets.
