From 1998 to 2002, project staff at the Center for Health Communication at the Harvard School of Public Health mounted a national media campaign—the Harvard Mentoring Project—to recruit large numbers of qualified mentors to build supportive relationships with at-risk youth.

Research shows that a positive relationship with an adult mentor can steer a young person away from drugs, violence, dropping out of school and teen pregnancy. The challenge has been to recruit more qualified mentors.

Key Results

The campaign accomplished the following:

• The campaign leveraged over $200 million in airtime and PSAs as well as dialogue in prime-time entertainment donated by the broadcast networks, Hollywood studios, cable channels and local affiliates.
• The campaign won the support of two successive U.S. presidents, helping to establish mentoring as an important national priority.
• During the campaign, the project generated more than 1 million telephone calls from people seeking information on mentoring programs in their own communities.
• Findings from an informal survey suggested that approximately 20 percent of callers subsequently became mentors.
• The number of people using the Web site to search for mentoring opportunities in their areas nearly doubled from January 2002 to January 2003.

Funding

The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) provided $2,014,703 for the campaign (ID# 031159). After three years, the campaign shifted from a year-round media campaign to an annual National Mentoring Month. RWJF provided a grant of $490,000 to support the effort during this transition (ID# 040878).