Founded, designed, and led by a village of individuals with shared lived experience of young parenthood, the Brave Foundation is a national not-for-profit organisation dedicated to supporting expecting and parenting young people. Brave’s flagship program, Supporting Expecting and Parenting Teens (SEPT), leverages the value strong mentoring relationships add to young peoples’ lives by linking young parents to professional mentors. Through SEPT, Brave Mentors provide holistic and individualised support in line with the young parents’ self-identified goals to equip them with knowledge, skills, connections and resources to enable young families to thrive.
In 2021, Brave launched a Digital Delivery pilot of SEPT program in recognition that young parents who were isolated by geography, disability or other circumstances were missing out on necessary supports and opportunities to achieve their aspirations and improve their own and their children’s wellbeing. This presentation will provide an overview of the design, methods, and findings of a program theory-driven and mixed-methods evaluation of the SEPT Digital Delivery pilot. The pilot involved 35 Digital and 170 In-Person Delivery participants and 7 Digital Delivery staff and participant interviews, and aimed to address questions about the Digital Delivery’s alignment with the general SEPT program theory, the value of the experience to participants, and the effectiveness of Digital vs. In-Person Program Delivery.
The project findings revealed surprising insights about the ways participants preferred to engage with Brave Mentors via technological means, as well as points of difference in the approaches Digital Mentors needed to take to build rapport with participants, develop relationships with stakeholders, and gain in-depth knowledge of a wide range of communities from a physical distance.
Lessons learned from the project highlighted the value of providing digital access to participants who are isolated for mental health reasons, in particular; the importance of participant readiness to engage with the opportunity; and the additional capabilities Digital Mentors require to enhance the effectiveness of digital mentoring support.
Dr Kelsey Deane is the Brave Foundation’s Research and Evaluation Manager and an Honorary Senior Lecturer with the University of Auckland. Dr Deane’s teaching, research and practice expertise is in the areas of positive youth development, youth mentoring and youth work, and program evaluation.
Dr Kelsey Deane
Research and Evaluation Manager, Brave Foundation
