Lighting the Way as a Mentor is a collection of reflective essays for mentors exploring what it means to walk alongside others without directing their path. Rather than offering instruction or defining best practices, this series dwells in the lived tensions of accompaniment—presence without control, guidance without imposition, and trust that unfolds over time. Each piece invites you to consider how light can be offered in ways that illuminate possibility while preserving dignity, agency, and discovery. These essays do not resolve the complexities of mentoring. They remain with them, creating space for you to recognize your own experiences, questions, and responsibilities within the work of walking alongside others.
Click here for reflective essays about Lighting the Way as a Mentor.
Mentor Tips
Mentor Tips is a reflective blog series created for mentors serving in nonprofit-, community-, and school-partnered programs. Mentor Tips centers relationship over technique and presence over performance. It recognizes that mentoring often unfolds slowly and touches many dimensions of growth, including identity, belonging, confidence, and direction. Rather than offering advice or corrective guidance, the series invites mentors to reflect on what it means to walk alongside someone over time with care and humility. Posts draw from lived mentoring realities—quiet conversations, long seasons, unanswered questions, and the tension between caring deeply and letting go of control. Mentor Tips exists to affirm that showing up matters, to normalize patience and ambiguity, and to support mentors as they accompany others without needing to fix or rescue.
Click here for Mentor Tips.
-
Light That Doesn’t Direct
Home » Publications » Mentoring SeriesThere are times when someone looks to you not for instruction, but for clarity, and the difference between the two is easy to miss. You may feel the pull to organize what they are experiencing into something more certain, to offer direction that feels helpful because it removes some of
-
What It Means to Light the Way
Home » Publications » Mentoring SeriesThere are moments when someone turns toward you—not because you have answers, but because something in your presence suggests that you might be able to help them see. It is rarely announced. It happens in a question that lingers a little longer than expected, or in a pause that invites
Bibliography
Carrillo, Juan F., Danielle Parker Moore, and Tim Conder, eds. Mentoring Students of Color : Naming the Politics of Race, Social Class, Gender, and Power. Leiden Boston: Brill , 2019. Print.
Dallos, Rudi, Hassina Carder-Gilbert, and Rebecca McKenzie. “Developing Bonds: An Exploration of the Development of Bonds between Mentors and Young People.” Clinical child psychology and psychiatry 26.4 (2021): 1214–1226. Web.
Goodrich, Andrew. “Peer Mentoring and Peer Tutoring Among K–12 Students: A Literature Review.” Update : applications of research in music education 36.2 (2018): 13–21. Web.
Gowdy, Grace, Daniel P Miller, and Renée Spencer. “Expanding and Deepening Our Understanding of Which Young People Are Most Likely to Have an Informal Mentor.” Children and youth services review 108 (2020): n. pag. Web.
Kraft, Matthew A, and Grace T Falken. “A Blueprint for Scaling Tutoring and Mentoring Across Public Schools.” AERA open 7.1 (2021): n. pag. Web.
McLaughlin, Gözde et al. “Mentoring in K-12 Computer Science Classrooms: Exploring Mentors’ and Mentees’ Experiences.” ACM transactions on computing education 26.1 (2025): n. pag. Web.
Meltzer, Ariella, and Isabella Saunders. “Cultivating Supportive Communities for Young People – Mentor Pathways into and Following a Youth Mentoring Program.” Children and youth services review 110 (2020): n. pag. Web.
National Youth Network (U.S.). Make a Friend : Be a Peer Mentor /. Washington, DC : U.S. Dept. of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, 1999. Print.
