A Quarter Century of California Mentoring
The California Mentoring Partnership traces its origins back to a public/private mentoring advocacy endeavor in the mid-1990’s called the California Mentor Initiative. Under Governors Wilson and Davis, the statewide mentoring movement operated as the Governor’s Mentoring Partnership, a body that helped to improve the quality and quantity of mentoring opportunities. From 1996 to 2008, California’s state government provided funding for no-cost technical assistance for any youth mentoring program, and for statewide workshops and mentoring summits. More than a dozen local level or countywide mentoring coalitions were created and supported. The Center for Applied Research Solutions (CARS), a Santa Rosa based non-profit agency, was consistently awarded the state grant to provide support for youth mentoring.
In 2011, several key organizations and professionals who had been instrumental to the Governor’s Mentoring Partnership came together to form the California Mentoring Partnership. Since CARS had been so integral to youth mentoring in California, it was decided that CARS would lead the Partnership and become its 501(c)3 fiscal sponsor. Over the past 10 years, CMP has worked to reinvigorate our coalitions network, provide effective training and technical assistance to the field, promote research of California mentoring programs, enhance the visibility of mentoring throughout the state, and build philanthropic and government relationships to support mentoring in California.
