Why one consistent mentor changes everything

The problem is rarely a lack of services

Ask a young person facing barriers how many workers they have had and most of them can count a long list. A youth worker here, a case manager there, a careers adviser at school, a new support coordinator every time the funding changed. Each one well meaning. Each one gone within months.

By the time that young person is seventeen, they have learned something nobody intended to teach them: adults turn up for a while and then they leave. So why invest in any of them?

We hear this constantly. It shapes how young people walk into a room, how much they say, and how little they expect. And it is why we built our approach around one simple principle. One consistent mentor. The same person, across the whole journey, who shows up and keeps showing up.

What consistency actually does

Consistency is not a nice to have. It is the thing that makes everything else work.

Trust takes time, and it cannot be handed over. A young person who has finally told their mentor the real reason they stopped going to school is not going to tell the next one. They will go back to the version of the story that is easy to repeat. Every handover resets the clock to zero, and for young people who have had many handovers, the clock stops running at all.

A consistent mentor also notices things. A change in mood over three weeks. A pattern of missing Thursdays. The way a young person lights up talking about one thing and shuts down about another. That noticing is not possible from a case file. It only comes from the same person being in the room, week after week.

And consistency models something. Many of the young people we work with have had very few experiences of an adult doing what they said they would do. A mentor who turns up on time, every time, for months, is teaching reliability without ever running a session on it.

Goals the young person actually set

The second principle is just as important as the first. The goals belong to the young person. Not to us, not to the referrer, not to a funding agreement.

That sounds obvious. In practice it is rare. Most of the goals written into young people’s plans were written by someone else, in language the young person does not use, toward outcomes the young person did not choose. Then everyone is surprised when the young person does not seem motivated.

Our mentors start with a different question. Not “what do you need to work on” but “what do you want”. Sometimes the answer is a job. Sometimes it is a licence, a place to live, getting back into a sport, reconnecting with a parent, or just getting through the year. Sometimes the first honest answer takes four sessions to arrive. We wait for it.

Once the goal is the young person’s own, the coaching becomes practical. What is the next step. What is in the way. What do we do about it this week. Review, adjust, go again. It is not complicated. It just has to be theirs.

Practical, not clinical

Mentoring at Sankofa is coaching, not counselling. Our mentors are not therapists and do not pretend to be. Where a young person needs clinical support, we connect them to it and we stay alongside them while they get it.

What a mentor does is practical. Sitting with a young person while they fill in the form they have been avoiding. Doing the mock interview three times until it stops being terrifying. Working out the bus route to the new job. Making the phone call together. Showing them how to read the payslip. Being the person they text when it goes wrong, and the person who says well done when it goes right.

None of it is dramatic. All of it adds up.

Why culture and lived experience matter here too

Many of the young people we mentor are navigating two worlds: the expectations of home and the expectations of Australian school, work and systems. A mentor who understands that, often because they have lived it, can hold both without asking the young person to choose.

That is why our mentors are drawn from the communities we serve wherever possible, and why every mentor completes Sankofa facilitation training in culturally grounded, trauma informed practice. Lived experience tells us what the young person is actually dealing with. Training tells us how to help well.

What we track

We measure whether young people reach the goals they set, and whether they are moving toward them. We track engagement, because a young person who keeps turning up is telling us something. And we ask them, directly and regularly, whether the mentoring is helping and what should change.

We also report on the thing that is hardest to count and matters most: whether the young person now has at least one adult they trust to show up. For a lot of the young people we work with, that is the outcome that changes everything else.

If you refer young people, or you want to talk about mentoring for the young people you work with, email info@sankofa.com.au.

Rooted in the past. Built for the future.

More from the blog →