YouthFriends is a preeminent school-based mentoring effort that provides technical assistance to school districts to help them connect young people with caring adult volunteers in schools to promote success, encourage healthy behaviors and build strong communities.

Developed in 1995 in Kansas City, Mo., YouthFriends expanded from a small pilot to include hundreds of school districts.

In its first 13 years, YouthFriends school districts screened, trained and placed more than 28,000 volunteers—positively touching the lives of nearly 200,000 young people.

YouthFriends was developed to meet the needs of volunteers and students, as well as to support the missions of participating school districts. YouthFriends technical assistance includes training for school district personnel and easy-to-implement volunteer marketing, recruitment, screening, training, matching and retention tools and tactics, leading-edge technology, risk management and evaluation strategies.

Evaluations show that students with YouthFriends mentors show improvements in academic performance, attendance and school connectedness. By using the YouthFriends model, school districts are assured of a proven, turnkey mentoring program that is cost-effective, easily implemented and meets or exceeds national best practice standards for safe, effective and accountable mentoring.