Positioning Mentors as Social Capital Builders

This project empirically evaluates a mentoring-focused toolkit that is iteratively designed and implemented with Big Brothers Big Sisters matches, to enhance mentee’s social capital development and prevent juvenile delinquency while mentees work towards their postsecondary college and career goals. The project will be conducted in three phases to address the following objectives: 1) unpack the mechanisms through which formal mentoring relationships expand and activate mentees’ social capital in support of their college and career goals, especially among mentors and mentees who do not share the same racial/ethnic background; 2) co-create a package of practical tools called the SoCap Builder Toolkit that mentoring matches can implement into their practice that will help them collaboratively and intentionally build mentee’s social capital development; and 3) empirically test the effectiveness of the SoCap Builder Toolkit in strengthening mentees’ social capital among a sample of mentoring dyads utilizing a quasi-experimental matched comparison design.