Hoosier faith communities can have a powerful connection to local youth
by including mentoring in their mission work…

— Talk about mentoring during service and dialogue

— Offer prayers for local youth, schools and mentors

— Share mentoring resources and opportunities with your members

— Include a mentoring program in your community outreach or special offerings.

Hand-in-Hand: Indiana’s Faith Community and Youth Mentoring

Mentoring a young person is faith in action.
It literally goes hand in hand, with the mission-related goals of any worship center.
Youth mentoring allows your worshipers to make a real and lasting difference for
your neighboring youth and families.

To answer the call to FAITH COMMUNITIES, decide where to begin…

…the POSSIBLE LEVELS OF MISSION INVOLVEMENT

Although very different, faith communities can invest in mentoring by doing any of the following:

Talk about mentoring during services and dialogue

• Introduce what youth mentoring is to your worshipers
• Explain why mentoring is a powerful way to put their faith into action

Offer prayers for local youth, schools and mentoring:

• In your prayers, remember the dreams and aspirations of local youth, their mentors and schools

Share mentoring resources and opportunities with your members

• Give your members information about ways they can answer the call to mentoring by listing local
  programs, contacts and opportunities

Include a mentoring program in your community outreach or special offerings

• Select a high quality mentoring program in your area that you want to build an ongoing
  relationship with. Include them in your mission work, as appropriate. Options include
  recruiting your members as mentors for them, or taking a special offering on their behalf.

Why Do Faith Communities Invest in Mentoring?

Worship Benefits

• The act of mentoring a young person can be a natural extension of one’s relationship with their God.

• When a worship center supports mentoring for youth, it is supporting the “impact ready” outreach
  opportunity that is widely accessible and shown to have very powerful results with youth

Member Benefits

• Strengthened faith and understanding of what it means to be doing God’s work.

• Receiving more than you give in service

• Heightened sense that you have, in a very direct and personal way, improved a child’s life

• Being able to easily connect with a partnering mentoring organization that your worship center
  has identified as providing high quality mentoring to the youth who need it most

Community Outreach Benefit

• Strengthened academic and life achievement of local youth

• Increased support available to the local schools and youth-serving organizations

• Greater community understanding of how to make a difference in the life of a child

How Do Faith Communities Maximize their Return on the Mentoring Investment?

The most essential requirements for generating HIGH IMPACT from your investment in mentoring are:

• Small, but effective start, that evolves and expands over time

• Introduce and re-introduce the concept of mentoring as a great way to turn faith into action

• Tell stories of mentoring’s impact – particularly those that involve your own members as mentors

• Strong commitment by your leaders and committees/ groups

• Select a “Signature” mentoring project, which you build into your standing community outreach
  that you have researched and found to be providing high quality mentoring

• Provide leveled options for a range of ways that worshipers can support mentoring, with varying
  levels of commitment and skills required