The Need for Mentoring Youth with Disabilities:Youth with physical or mental disabilities represent special populations at risk for juvenile delinquency, victimization, educational failure, and poor employment outcomes and often have multiple, overlapping risk factors. Such youth can and do benefit from mentoring relationships.

The Need for Inclusive Mentoring Programs:Youth with disabilities typically to receive mentoring within disability-specific programs rather than in inclusive, community-based programs that have a diversity of resources that promote education, job readiness, development of employment skills, and/or training in and exposure to entrepreneurial activities.

The Benefits:

• Youth with disabilities can participate with their typically developing peers in mentoring programs,
• The community capacity to serve people with disabilities would be enhanced with training, technical assistance, and programmatic supports,
• There is a social value to providing inclusive supports and services, and
• Through building the capacity of community-based mentoring programs to serve all youth well-including those with special physical or mental challenges-is more cost-effective than supporting multiple specialty services.

 Factsheet:

AUCD has developed a factsheet that provides an overview of mentoring youth with disabilities, and gives examples of promising practices from the AUCD network. Click here: factsheet in PDF