ABSTRACT
Youth mentoring has expanded spectacularly over the past decade. By the early 1990s, tens of thousands of middle-class adults across North America were volunteering as mentors for poor urban youth through the programme Big Brothers Big Sisters – a mass movement which has come to represent a social and historical phenomenon in its own right (Freedman, 1999). By the mid-1990s, this movement had also begun to grow rapidly in the UK.
