Mentoring has been regarded as a promising way to reach at-risk youth and to strengthen the protective factors. This article focuses on emotions, reflections, and challenges that adult volunteers face in trying to establish and maintain a friend relationship with young adults in a multicomponent mentor setting in Finland. Based on our…

The OECD Career Readiness project makes use of quantitative evidence to identify how teenage career-related activities and attitudes are linked with better adult employment outcomes. Review of multiple national longitudinal datasets confirms that teenage experiences of the workplace through part-time working and volunteering are routinely…

The aim of the OECD Career Readiness project is to identify patterns of teenage attitudes and activities that are associated with better transitions into employment by analysing multiple national longitudinal datasets. This paper looks for further evidence of the link between teenage activities, experiences and career-related thinking and adult…

The arts have played powerful utilitarian roles for individuals and for the societies in which they live for millennia. For the last 250 years, though, "art for art's sake" -- the notion that commercial, utilitarian, moral, or didactic functions are distractions from art's ineffable, intrinsic value as an expression of the artists'…

Analysis of calls made to a northern Canadian Inuit crisis line in the territory of Nunavut between 1991 and 2001 revealed that the majority of users were adult females who called to discuss problems primarily related to relationships and loneliness/boredom. Younger callers tended to make prank calls. The volunteer staff used mostly empathetic…

One might assume that familiarity with a scene or previous encounters with objects embedded in a scene would benefit subsequent search for those items. However, in a series of experiments we show that this is not the case: When participants were asked to subsequently search for multiple objects in the same scene, search performance remained…

Purpose: Based on visual inspection, prior research documented increased movement of the posterior pharyngeal wall in healthy volunteers during tongue-hold swallows. This manometric study investigated the immediate effects of the tongue-hold maneuver on pharyngeal peak pressure generation, duration of pressure generation, and pressure slope…

Community choirs in America furnish the primary musical setting for adult amateur singers wishing to continue their choral experiences after formal public schooling or college. Nearly 1400 community choral organizations--or those meeting the established parameters--were catalogued by ACDA for its 2007 "National Registry of Community Choirs". A…

Based on the idea that eating is an environmental act, we designed an environmental education project where elementary school children and community elders work as partners to raise food crops on an urban organic farm. Our goal was to illustrate how eco-philosophies could be translated into educational programs that foster environmental…

Recent research has demonstrated that older adult volunteers are more likely to be involved in relationship building with young people who are in difficult situations, in periods of transition, and in educational endeavors than volunteers of younger ages. Research also suggests that nurturing, giving to, and serving others contributes to greater…

High schools have recently become a popular source of mentors for school-based mentoring (SBM) programs. The high school Bigs program of Big Brothers Big Sisters of America, for example, currently involves close to 50,000 high-school-aged mentors across the country. While the use of these young mentors has several potential advantages, their age…

This policy memorandum provides a summary of what is known about voluntary activity in the United States in general and in Job Training Partnership Act (JTPA) service delivery areas (SDAs) in particular. It suggests possible short- and long-term policy strategies that might be used to increase the effectiveness of voluntary service in JTPA…

This volume tells the story of the concerned adults who have come forward to mentor disadvantaged urban youth, one-on-one, in cities across the country. It illustrates what middle-class volunteers can do to ameliorate the conditions of young people living in poverty. Mentoring can complement government efforts and contribute to the broader…

We present new evidence on the civic engagement of immigrants and the children of immigrant parents (ages 15 to 25). Utilizing the 2006 Civic and Political Health of the Nation Survey conducted by CIRCLE, we find that young immigrants report lower levels of civic engagement on most measures compared to natives. However, once observable demographic…

Poor school attendance is a problem in many schools throughout the United States. A study was conducted on students in an elementary school who were all paired with adult volunteer reading partners to assess whether attendance improved the year the reading program was implemented. The study involved a pre- and posttest exploratory research design…