Project 1: The “all-important mentor programs analysis” project

Unlike other services like transport, we don’t track every single time somebody starts up with a mentor or when a mentorship ends.

No one number will give you a reasonably complete picture of the situation. But by gathering multiple data sources and tracking them over time, you should be able to get an idea of how much mentorship is happening in your community. Here’s your list:

• School districts: They may have data on students needing various forms of mentorship and accessing it.
• Youth shelters: Some may keep data on their residents seeking mentorship. Unlike the government, they’re not necessarily obligated to give you the data, but they probably will.
• Child welfare data: While not easy to acquire, there may be a way to access data on child clients needing a mentor. Because of the short-term living arrangements that kids in custody may live in, mentoring may be challenging. It’s still worth researching this area.
• Find data from the American Community Survey.

As mentioned, this won’t be as simple an assessment as the transport situation, but if you get these numbers, you could discern if the situation in your community is going in a good or bad direction.

Imagine a near future when all young residents have a youth pass — a plastic card or mobile app with barcode — that would be used for all forms of mentorship programs. Now imagine that an artificial intelligence (AI) program and friendly staffers analyze all this data from all county residents to identify high and low use and where gaps in mentoring services exist, offering recommendations for fixing gaps. In this project, you will be gathering as much data as you can to paint a picture of local mentoring in your county. This is the first step in identifying challenges.