Nationally, published research supports that students served by one-to-one mentors experience positive emotional, behavioral, and academic effects. Mentored students demonstrate an improved attitude, improved social skills, improved self-esteem, better school attendance,
and are less likely to use drugs or participate in violent activity. Mentoring can also help with employment or career development for secondary students and mentoring can actually improve parental relationships.

The TeamMates Mentoring Program follows the school-based mentoring model. The major research-based advantages of school-based, one-to-one mentoring are: increased volunteer commitment due to less time constraints, more potential to reach the needed youth since schools refer the student as opposed to parents, costs are decreased, and a clear linkage to academic support can be identified. School-based programs like TeamMates also enjoy greater access to minority volunteers than community-based mentoring programs. Since mentors work closely with students, they may see difficulties that would be otherwise missed.

In this respect, school-based mentors can assist teachers with the educational process by paying specific attention to those students who have the greatest needs.

In addition to these national trends, the TeamMates Mentoring Program works with the Gallup organization to annually evaluate its own effectiveness. For the 2006-2007 school year, here are some highlights:

In Bonnie Benard’s book Resiliency: What We Have Learned (2004), she explains that the most common attribute identified by researchers in successful at-risk youth is resilience. Resilience is fostered by three protective factors: caring relationships, high expectations and opportunities to participate and contribute. TeamMates mentors can directly provide, or at least provide access to, all three of these protective factors. By increasing the resiliency of these students who
are at a high risk of academic failure and who live in a high poverty environment, TeamMates mentors can make the critical difference in determining whether or not these students will be successful.