Mentors for High-Risk Minority Youth: From Effective Communication to Bicultural Competence

Proposes a contextually based social-learning formulation of how successful mentoring programs combat delinquency, school dropout, teen pregnancy, and unemployment among inner city, minority youth. Successful mentors are biculturally competent, proud of their origins, and effective in underclass as well as mainstream contexts. Through effective communication, mentors ally with proteges and inspire them toward bicultural competence. When proteges lack skills required for bicultural competence, mentoring combined with behavioral skill training at home, at school, and with peers can promote acquisition, generalization, and maintenance of necessary skills. A prevention program offering mentoring and behavioral skill training in multiple natural contexts offers both political pragmatism and scientific credibility.