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December Community Coffee Hour
December 13, 2023 @ 9:00 am - 10:00 am
Grab your coffee or tea, and join your mentoring program peers and MENTOR Virginia on Wednesday, December 13th from 9:00 – 10:00 am for Community Coffee Hour. In our November session we had two program administrators sharing about ways they include youth voice in programming. In this session, we will discuss ways we can include youth in data collection activities to support evaluation and continuous improvement. We’ll be joined by John Harris of MENTOR Virginia and Manolya Tanyu from the American Institutes for Research (AIR) for a discussion on incorporating youth voice in program evaluation and continuous improvement efforts. In this interactive session, John and Manolya will help us think through benefits of involving youth and how we can achieve meaningful youth involvement.
MENTOR Virginia will virtually host Community Coffee Hour every 2nd Wednesday of the month with mentoring program staff to create space for peer-to-peer learning and resource sharing, and to address issues you and your organization might be facing during the pandemic and beyond. We hope to see you at an upcoming Community Coffee Hour!
Meet Our Guest Speakers:
John Harris specializes in program evaluation and survey development with a particular focus on assessing match characteristics. He has worked as an independent consultant supporting mentoring programs since 2000. He joined the MENTOR Virginia team as a Technical Assistance Consultant in 2016. The National Mentoring Resource Center’s work dovetails perfectly with John’s mission to make high-quality evaluation and consultation useful and affordable to all mentoring programs.
John is the lead author of the Match Characteristics Questionnaire (MCQ) and the Youth Mentoring Survey (YMS), which are recommended by the National Mentoring Resource Center (NMRC) and used around the world. His publications have focused on mentoring relationship quality and include peer-reviewed journal articles, toolkit contributions, and the chapters, “Assessing Mentoring Relationships,” in both editions of the Handbook of Youth Mentoring (DuBois & Karcher, Ed.s). In 2015, John partnered with the School Volunteer Program (now EdConnect) in Australia to develop an evaluation toolkit that won a National Social Impact award.
John earned his Masters at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education many, many years ago. He currently works and lives in Fairfax, VA, with his wife and two wonderful kids.
Manolya Tanyu, PhD, a senior researcher at AIR, brings 15 years of expertise in evaluations of community and school-based initiatives, programs, and services to promote youth development. Dr. Tanyu is an advocate for supportive youth-adult relationships as a way to promote well-being and resilience and reduce delinquent behavior and system involvement. She has worked on several federally funded research studies of mentoring programs examining implementation and outcomes. She joined our November 2022 community coffee hour last year to share on the national study of the YMCA’s Reach & Rise® Mentoring program and therapeutic mentoring. Dr. Tanyu is committed to sharing research to contribute to practice and working with practitioners to build data and evaluation capacities. She is also passionate about bringing youth voice into programs and initiatives that serve youth. She is a Research Board member at the National Mentoring Resource Center where she provides evaluation technical assistance, conducts resource reviews, and writes for practitioners. She lives in Fairfax, VA and is a volunteer mentor for Fairfax County Public Schools’ MentorWorks program.