ABSTRACT
Many studies of mentoring suggest that mentors benefit by increasing their own social and cultural capital. One expectation of the New Beginnings scheme may be that mentors were likely to gain greater benefits from their participation than the young people, since university students could capitalize on the more substantial cultural resources they already possessed. Employers, for example, have been willing to allow their staff time to volunteer for industrial mentoring in schools, in part because of the transferable skills it is thought to develop in mentors themselves. Gardiner (1995) produces a far longer list of benefits for mentors than for mentees in her study of the BEAT project, an engagement mentoring scheme for young offenders in Birmingham, many of whom were from black and Asian communities. Nevertheless, her study also contains hints that all might not be positive in terms of outcomes for mentors.
