Milwaukee’s Mentoring Programs Are Falling Short Without the Data to Fix It

When LaNelle Ramey talks about mentoring, he is careful with his words. As executive director of MENTOR Greater Milwaukee, he has spent years watching organizations claim they mentor young people and mean something entirely different.

“We hear a lot of programs say they do it, but then when you dig deep, it’s just we did a panel discussion with kids,” Ramey told the city’s Emerging Youth Achievement Advisory Council at its April 23 meeting. “That’s not mentorship. That’s exposure.”

This difference matters more than it might seem. Milwaukee youth mentoring is in a crisis, not just a shortage of mentors one that leaves hundreds of children on waitlists while the system meant to serve them struggles to agree on what it is actually doing.

MENTOR Greater Milwaukee was founded in 2019 with backing from the City of Milwaukee, the Milwaukee Bucks, and Milwaukee Public Schools. Its mission is straightforward which is to increase the mentoring capacity of organizations serving youth ages 10 to 24 across the metro area. It operates as part of a national affiliate network of 23 organizations headquartered in Boston, allowing it to draw on best practices from cities like Baltimore, Los Angeles, and Sacramento.

Right now, more than 200 youth sit on the waitlist at Big Brothers Big Sisters of Metro Milwaukee alone. Running Rebels, another prominent program, faces similar backlogs. Parents are calling MENTOR’s office looking for programs for their 7- and 8-year-olds, only to be told that most programs don’t start until age 10.

“You have a 13-year-old, a 10-year-old, and a seven-year-old,” Ramey said. “You’ve got two children who do not have a mentor based on how programs are set up right now.”

Part of the problem, Ramey argues, is that Milwaukee doesn’t have a shared understanding of what mentoring actually requires. His organization pushes what it calls the “science of mentoring,” a framework built around consistency, structure, and evidence-based training. According to that framework, a mentor who spends one and a half hours per month with a young person, consistently, for at least six months, can meaningfully improve that young person’s life. A mentor who spends four hours with a kid one time and never sees them again cannot.

“If I meet with one kid for four hours on one day and don’t see that kid again, I’m not as effective,” Ramey said. “Consistently, that’s the key word.”

MENTOR requires all 102 of its program partners to complete training in what it calls the Elements of Effective Mentoring Practices. Background checks for mentors are mandatory. But beyond those baseline requirements, MENTOR’s leverage is limited. Programs are not required to share data or outcomes, which means there is no reliable way to know whether the mentoring happening across Milwaukee is actually working.

“Getting organizations to share their data, there’s fear in that,” Ramey said. “We don’t want data to smack people in the hands. We just want to give accurate data.”

That gap has real consequences. Without shared data, MENTOR cannot tell the council whether Milwaukee needs more male mentors, how many youth are being served through one-on-one versus group models, or which programs are producing results and which are not.

Alderman Jose Pettis, who chairs the Advisory Council, pushed Ramey on the accountability question directly.

“I don’t think it’s a bad thing to grade them,” Pettis said. “If we want to measure some outcomes and make a difference, we’ve got to have some benchmark.”

Ramey agreed, pointing to a tool called the National Quality Mentoring System, an external evaluation framework, as a potential solution. He suggested that funders, including those distributing Community Development Block Grant dollars through the city, could require organizations to complete the evaluation as a condition of funding.

“If you say you do mentoring, here’s how that looks,” Ramey said. “And here’s what you should be doing to support that young person.”

The stakes of getting this right are not abstract. A 2024 study on Wisconsin youth mental health found that the sense of belonging among young people dropped 37 percent over a 10-year period. In Milwaukee’s K-12 schools, 45 percent of African American students reported not having a single trusted adult in the building they felt they could go to.

Ramey drew a direct line between those numbers and the city’s graduation rates, which hover around 67 to 72 percent.

“When you have a 37 percent lack of belonging, it’s a correlation,” he said. “When you have 45 percent of students who feel like they don’t have someone they can go to in the school, it’s a correlation.”

MENTOR’s goal, Ramey said, is for every young person in Milwaukee to have at least three mentors: one in school, one in their community, and one in the workforce.

It is an ambitious target for a city still working out what the word mentor means.

MENTOR Greater Milwaukee can be reached through milwaukeementor.com, where families can search for programs and mentors can find organizations to join. Of the 102 programs currently listed, 86 are actively accepting new mentors and mentees.