The client

The Care Journeys team in Barnardo's, the UK's largest children's charity.

The brief 

Care Journeys was set up as one of Barnardo's Core Priority Programme areas as part of their 2016-2025 strategy. Their vision was to create a world where: "Everyone who interacts with a care journey - whether young person, professional, parent or carer, or something else - feels loved, supported, and given opportunities which matter to them."

In 2022, in support of that vision, Care Journeys commissioned us to find out more about how community-based support (such as mentoring) can support care-experienced young people through life transitions and help them to develop positive relationships. They wanted a strong research base to start influencing and advocacy work from, so wanted to learn lessons from a mentoring service elsewhere inside of their organisation.

What we did

• Scoped a research project around community-based support and mentoring, using the Manchester Care Experienced Service as a case study
• Held interviews with 18 mentors, mentees, volunteers and staff members
• Developed a research report about the benefits of community-based support for both mentors and mentees
• Created a service blueprint with clear points of consideration, so that other people can start up mentoring schemes for care-experienced young people

What we learned 

• Mentoring helps mentees to "build their world" by creating community connections, helping people with feelings of isolation, and building their confidence.
• Mentees value a mentor who cheerleads them, actively listens to them, and who can give them guidance and support, rather than telling them what to do.
• The non-professional nature of the mentoring relationship was really valuable, as it created a sense of authenticity and flexibility, and evolves naturally over time. It helps to create connections that might not otherwise have existed, which can be valuable, meaningful relationships.
• People became mentors because of a desire to "give back", to help people with experiences they've had in the past, or to live their own values.
• Mentoring is a reciprocal relationship—the mentor learns from their mentee just as much as the opposite happens. This can help people destigmatise some experiences and help people to learn about situations they might not know about.
• A good mentor knows to confront their preconceptions and expectations, and take their ego out of the relationship. You can't be an effective mentor if you approach the relationship with a clear idea of what you’re going to do for your mentee, because their needs may be different to what you imagine.
• Mentoring / community-based support can be a really impactful intervention for care-experienced young people, but there are few community-based support offerings to young people over the age of 18. Community-based support seems to be of even greater benefit to Unaccompanied Asylum Seeking Children, as mentoring can help them to get to know their local area, build their skills in spoken and written English, and to both acclimatise to the UK and to find communities that speak their language and are familiar with their culture.
• This was our first project as an incorporated organisation, so we also learned a lot about how to effectively work together, what our shared research practice might look like, and what project management processes we needed to develop.

What we made

• A research report, exploring the experiences of care-experienced mentees and community-based mentors
• A service blueprint for mentoring/community-based support for care-experienced young people

Both of these can be found on the Barnardo's website.