The National Mentoring Partnership (MENTOR) recently released the fourth edition of Elements of Effective Practice for Mentoring, which includes a collection of research-informed practices for creating and sustaining quality youth mentoring programs. The report covers six core standards of practice: recruitment, screening, training, matching and initiating, monitoring and support, and closure. Each standard includes benchmarks and enhancements, as well as recommendations for program planning and management. In addition to Elements, MENTOR provides other resources, including a toolkit and a series of webinars, to help implement mentoring programs.

This issue of The Future of Children focuses on U.S. child health policy. The articles within the publication present findings such as: a wide range of policies from mental health to family interventions can affect children’s health, child health is generally approached with a crisis-response mentality, limited data exists on cost-effectiveness of child health services, poor and minority children are at the highest risk for health problems, and responsibility for child health is fragmented between families and the various levels of government.