From Jess, KCN Mentoring Co-ordinator
Quality in Mentoring Award (QiM)
Over the last 6 months I have been working on achieving the 'Quality in Mentoring' (QiM) award through 'Befriending Networks' which is a quality award for mentoring services. There are two levels at which QiM can be awarded which are 'The Award' and 'Excellence' and KCN now has the QiM Excellence award which will hopefully help secure future funding to enable the programme to continue.
This process included uploading evidence for nearly a hundred indicators, uploading case studies, mentor interviews, mentee/young carer interviews and attending a few training courses.
Achieving this award wouldn't have been possible without our incredible team of volunteer mentors. Over the past 18 months, 37 mentors have been recruited. Everyone has such a unique journey, and all are making many positive changes to the young carers they are matched with.
Mentor stats
All young carers on the mentor programme do a series of questionnaires at the beginning of mentoring and then repeat the same questionnaires near the end.
One of the questionnaires is all about resilience and how quick young carers can bounce back from stressful situations. We use an internationally recognised scale called The Brief Resilience Scale which is a score between 1 and 6. The score from the start to the end of mentoring increased from 3.7 to 4.6 which tells us that after mentoring young carers show a high resilience. There was an improvement from all 6 questions telling us that after mentoring, on average young carers are able to:
- Bounce back quicker after hard times
- Find it easier to deal with stressful situations
- Take less time to recover from stressful events
- Find it easier to snap back when something bad happens
- Come through difficult times with less trouble
- Take less time to get over setbacks in life