ABOUT ME

Just the Facts

I founded Applied Research Consulting (ARC) in 2000 to bridge the gap between research and practice in mentoring. I am the lead consultant on ARC’s projects. I also am certified as a Technical Assistance (TA) provider for the National Mentoring Resource Center (NMRC). I am the lead author of the Youth Mentoring Survey (YMS) and the Match Characteristics Questionnaire (MCQ), which are recommended by the NMRC and used around the world. I have written about assessing mentoring relationships in both editions of the Handbook of Youth Mentoring, the Elements of Effective Practice in Mentoring (EEPM), and peer-reviewed articles. I presented on my work at the National Mentoring Summit in 2013 and 2019. A toolkit I designed to support evaluation won a national award for a youth mentoring program in Australia.

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Color Commentary

You probably have a friend or relative who loves to take things apart and figure how how they work. They are good at fixing and enhancing those things. That's me, but with mentoring.

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I founded Applied Research Consulting (ARC) in 2000 to bridge the gap between research and practice in mentoring. I saw lots of research being done on whether mentoring worked but very little being done to show how. In a field where it sometimes seemed there were as many flavors of mentoring as there were programs delivering it, I wanted to help practitioners make data-driven decisions about implementation. I like to say it's not enough to do "good work." We need to do "good work" well.

 

So, I have developed the most comprehensive tools available for assessing match quality and the dynamics that promote it. You can download them here for free, along with scoring tools and other resources. I have focused my career on using them to help individual programs understand how to make their programs as positive for youth as they can be. My mission is to make it cost-effective and feasible for them to pursue the mission of serving youth well. 

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When you hire me, you are engaging a professional learner. I know that practitioners understand mentoring in ways that researchers cannot, so I make sure my work for every program accounts for what the people who run it already know.

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see it as my job to be good at drawing on what practitioners know about their work and what's known more broadly about mentoring to 

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I specialize in action research, instrument development, and the integration of quantitative and qualitative methods to provide the most useful insight on the programs I serve.

 

Along the way, I have drawn on what I learned from those projects to inform the field. 

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