College and Career Readiness Mentor Toolkit

For youth-serving mentoring organizations, providing mentors with the tools they need to effectively reach students is a crucial key to their success. The College & Career Readiness Mentor Toolkit is a research-based collection of targeted activities that mentors can use with their mentees, as they help them prepare for post-secondary experience and career success. The topics covered by the College and Career Readiness Mentor Toolkit include: personal growth and development, supporting academic success, college readiness, career readiness, and the roadmap to college. The toolkit also offers resources for mentoring organizations interested in incorporating social-emotional learning, group mentoring, and virtual mentoring into their practice.

Take Stock in Children (www.takestockinchildren.org) is a non-profit organization serving the state of Florida that offers students a way out of poverty and into higher education through scholarships, mentors, and hope. The organization was founded in 1995 by a group of education, community, and business leaders frustrated by the large number of at-risk children in Florida not accessing higher education and being shut out of life-changing jobs and opportunities. Together, they created a simple, yet transformative solution. Students are recruited in middle and high school and receive comprehensive support through post-secondary graduation. Each student benefits from regular meetings with a volunteer adult mentor, professional post-secondary success and career coaching, and sign a contract agreeing to remain drug and crime free and maintain high attendance and grades. In exchange for this commitment students receive a post-secondary scholarship to mitigate the financial barrier to higher education. To date, Take Stock in Children has served over 32,000 students, consistently producing remarkable results. The organization has a statewide reach that is currently unmatched by any other mentoring and college readiness organization in the United States, with affiliates serving all 67 Florida counties. The organization is also one of the nation's most well-established public-private ventures. Since its establishment, Take Stock in Children has given out over $225 million in scholarships to deserving low-income students.