(PS5-23) Implementing Lunch Buddy Mentoring in a Community Agency

Abstract Text: As a youth-focused prevention strategy, mentoring offers several advantages: It can be used to support youth facing a range of psychosocial concerns (King et al., 2019), it has wide public appeal (Hagler et al., 2020), and it is fueled by volunteer mentors supported by programs such as Big Brothers Big Sisters (BBBS) found in nearly every U.S. city. Thus, to the degree mentoring can benefit youth (Raposa et al., 2019), it has the potential to be a widely used strategy for addressing youth mental health and developmental risks (Cavell et al., 2021). Lunch Buddy (LB) mentoring is a form of school-based mentoring that embeds mentors at the school lunch table, which has been found to be a pivotal context for children’s social development (Craig et al., 2016; Steggerda et al, 2022, 2023). LB mentoring has shown promise as a means of helping elementary school children who are chronically bullied at school (Craig et al., 2015; Elledge et al., 2010; Gregus et al., 2015). Importantly, recent studies reveal that school-wide antibullying programs (Olweus et al., 2019), while effectively reducing overall levels of school victimization (Li et al., 2024; Salmivalli et al., 2018), can lead to negative effects for chronically bullied children who are more visible when the number of victims is lowered (i.e., “the healthy context paradox”). Gregus et al. (2020) identified LB mentoring as a promising strategy for supporting individual victims that avoids the iatrogenic impact of universal anti-bullying interventions. However, this program is university based and mentors are enrolled in a credit-bearing service- learning course. Unclear is whether LB mentoring can be integrated into the programs offered by BBBS and other mentoring organizations. Cavell et al. (2021) noted that “thinly funded” mentoring organizations are compelled to make program decisions that maintain “market share in the nonprofit space”, which means there is “little bandwidth to take on and test additional research-driven programs, however promising these might be” (p. 285). Therefore, this study represents a first look at whether a research-derived mentoring program can be implemented into a Big Brothers Big Sisters (BBBS) agency. A mixed-methods approach will be used to assess the feasibility, usability, and acceptability of LB mentoring as operated by a BBBS agency. Data will be gathered from key stakeholders, including BBBS staff, referring parents, mentors, and school staff. Guiding this work is Ghate’s 2016 implementation model, focusing on the exploration and installation phases. Data collection for this implementation trial is ongoing. We hypothesize that LB mentoring will be perceived as feasible, useful, and acceptable by BBBS staff and other key stakeholders. Findings from this study will provide insight on the viability of integrating evidence-based mentoring practices into established mentoring organizations such as BBBS.