Silver Lining Mentoring Feedback Survey Insights

In 2022, Silver Lining Mentoring sent out feedback surveys to current transition-age mentees and volunteer mentors. We are grateful for the feedback our community gave us to tell us how we’re doing as an organization, how things are going for matches, and what we can improve.

Our team is committed to lifting up stakeholder voices and experiences to enhance the work we do through quality feedback loops. Quality feedback loops are iterative cycles of engaging in stakeholder feedback that aims to build community trust and inclusion by collecting lived expertise; analyzing that feedback; & sharing what we heard and how we plan to use that feedback back with the community.

SLM completes one mentee and one mentor feedback loop survey per calendar year; in addition to other forms of stakeholder feedback like 1:1 interviews, focus groups and our youth led Participant Advisory Board. In addition to program enhancement, these feedback surveys are also used to collect individual and community impact data.

Silver Lining Mentoring is grateful for everyone who participated throughout the process, special gratitude for our Participant Advisory Board including: developing mentee questions, analyzing mentee and mentor responses, and helping ground the feedback work we are doing.

Mentees and mentors were asked, “What is Silver Lining Mentoring good at?” These are the top three responses and the percentage of responses that mentioned each theme:

We asked mentees about ways they’d like to interact with their volunteer mentors. These are the top themes from each response:

After reviewing all of the feedback mentees and volunteer mentors shared with us, Silver Lining Mentoring staff sat down to reflect on the information to make meaningful enhancements to our work.

Based on what the community shared, these are the things we heard and how we plan to enhance the mentee and volunteer mentor experience.

What we heard…

  • Many mentees shared the impact of having a consistent positive adult in their life, and mentors seem to have an increasing awareness of this impact.
  • Mentees are interested in having more support around self-actualization which is a key part of our CLIMB curriculum and mentors identified continuing education topics to best support their mentees.
  • Mentees overwhelmingly appreciated our financial resources.
  • Mentees and mentors accomplished a lot this past year.
  • Silver Lining Mentoring is doing well with supporting emotional and social connection, but folks are interested in larger social connections/group activities.

What we’re continuing to prioritize, start or improve…

  • We will continue to follow our Standards of Match Support (SOMS), but will also make sure to remind matches of who to reach out to when they may be unavailable.
  • We will try to seek additional feedback from mentors about which supports need more clarity/how easy or challenging are they to navigate. We will ensure new community members are aware of this by sharing this feedback directly in our mentor training/interviews, and mentee/mentor recruitment spaces.
  • We will continue offering our mentors continued learning space and find ways to make any material/content accessible. We will work on clarifying and better marketing what types of financial support are available to mentees each year.
  • We will continue celebrating milestones and achievements of mentees more often with our larger community and at special events.
  • We will continue to address life skills and milestones and support this through the CLIMB (Community, Learning, Interdependence, Mentoring, Belonging) pilot initiative. CLIMB was developed to meet the needs of transition age youth.

Over the course of the survey, we received 22 responses from mentees and 29 responses from mentors. Thank you all who provided their feedback and insight-this is a gift we can use to help us grow and better support more young people effected by foster care.

If you have any questions, reflections or concerns, please reach out: outcomes@silverliningmentoring.org.