Recruiting mentors in tribal/rural communities: 10 tips

According to Mark LoMurray (2004) of the North Dakota Tribal/Rural Mentoring Project, effective practices that have enhanced recruitment efforts include:

• At the heart of mentor recruitment is community organizing. The mentor coordinator should spend most of his/her time in the community, not in an office, because one-on-one contacts, conversations, and relationships are crucial. As Claudette McLeod of Turtle Mountain Mentoring Partnership notes, "Almost all of our mentors come from one-on-one conversations I have throughout my week and most of these happen in school hallways, in a cafe over a cup of coffee, on the street, at basketball games, at pow-wows, and before or after formal recruitment presentations."
• Tribal mentoring program coordinators should reside in the local communities, because residence provides them with valuable knowledge about the community members, kinship systems, and political and cultural dynamics of the region.
• Assemble an advisory council made up of community members who bring their knowledge of their community and wisdom to the table. They know which community members would be healthy mentors and which have a history of being responsible and "following through." They are invaluable for identifying potential recruits.
• A well-respected "community champion" for mentoring is very helpful in getting the mentoring word around a tribal region. In North Dakota, Jarrett Baker, executive director for the Boys and Girls Club of Three Affiliated Tribes, has played that role. As a result of his outreach and promotion, partnerships with schools, local colleges, diabetes programs, and other community health representatives and organizations have begun.
• Target groups of friends as mentors. More than 65 percent of mentors in Turtle Mountain's tribal areas have a close friend who is also mentoring. Individuals who are often hesitant or shy about mentoring quickly become involved if they have the opportunity to go through the program and come to activities with a friend.
• Find an organization or group from which you can get significant involvement, and then have that group "model" the concept of mentoring to the rest of the community. Examples can be Boys and Girls Club staff and volunteers, members of a spiritual/cultural group or church, casino employees, or a group of law enforcement officers or emergency management technicians. Seeing an entire organization commit to mentoring may motivate other large-scale sources of volunteers in the community.
• Target multi-generations of mentors— from teens through adulthood, all the way up to the most elder members of the community. Although these groups each require a different style, approach, and message during recruitment, and each requires a different approach to support and supervision, involving a wide spectrum of ages allows for a greater potentiality of tapping into the entire population.
• Use media to promote the program. Multimedia outreach has proven to be very important, even in the most rural communities. Use pamphlets, tribal newspapers, local newspapers, television, and especially tribal radio station advertising to inform the community about mentoring success stories and opportunities. Media outreach is a way to remind people that mentoring is a powerful change agent not only for individual mentors and youth, but for the whole community as well. Subsequently, find ways to publicly honor and acknowledge mentors of all ages in conjunction with outreach efforts.
• Make it easy for people to become involved by allowing a variety of mentoring "flavors": school-based, faith-based, cultural-focused, and community-based. For each of these types of mentoring there should exist core expectations around screening, training, matching, frequency of contact, support and supervision, and evaluation. But having a variety of options and mentoring styles seems to make mentoring an easier fit for mentors.
• Partner with other organizations to address transportation issues; provide consistency to stave off potential disruption. Transportation and "crisis concerns" are two common questions raised by potential mentors in tribal communities. Transportation can be a significant issue especially for teen and elder mentors. The solution often involves partnering with schools, churches, and other community programs that have access to vans or have transportation systems already developed. This is vital in areas where a visit to a doctor means a 70-mile drive one way. Potential mentors are also often concerned that they will be drawn into a family's "pattern of crisis"— boundary issues need to be addressed with an emphasis on the role of the mentor coordinator as the person to contact and hand off crisis concerns. A good crisis management tool for mentors/mentees is to simply schedule a same place, same time every week meeting. This builds some predictability into the relationship and can add some stability to what is often a crisis-driven family life for the youth.

According to Mark LoMurray (2004), other things to consider when thinking about recruiting mentors for tribal programs are:

• The concepts of nurturing, community, and compassion associated with mentoring are at the heart of many tribal values, and historically tribal communities were the ultimate in mentoring communities. Although this has been mitigated by historical traumas such as placement on reservations and the ritual of boarding school removal of adolescents for many generations, mentoring should not be considered a "new" prevention strategy being introduced and implemented from outside the community. Rather, mentoring should be understood as an approach that draws on preexisting strengths from within the tribal community.
• In many tribal communities there is an almost constant starting and stopping of youth programs and prevention efforts, and federal, state and tribal funding streams come and go, often changing directions every few years. This can result in skepticism and has greatly affected the ability of new programs to recruit volunteers. Having committed, long-term quality staff and a realistic long-term vision are critical when introducing mentoring in tribal communities.
• It is necessary to provide support and care to site-level mentoring coordinators, as those individuals are vital to getting people interested in serving. Most mentors in tribal/rural communities respond directly to the mentor coordinator, not to the existence of the program itself. Those individuals essentially are the program, to an extent not usually seen in larger, urban programs. Support includes continued training opportunities and monthly meetings where they can share success and struggles with other mentor coordinators.