Scottish Mentoring Network (SMN) is a membership organisation providing advice, guidance, support and training to a wide range of mentoring projects in Scotland at both a national and local level. Our members support many different service users to achieve positive outcomes in their lives. Many of our projects work with young people ranging from school children to young people at risk of truanting, offending or affected by substance misuse either directly or in the home environment. Others work with vulnerable adults including lone and teenage parents, homeless persons, those furthest from employment, ex or current offenders, those affected by abuse or substance misuse, adults affected by disability etc.

Although the majority of our members work with service users who could be considered vulnerable in some way others work with such as colleges and universities to improve outcomes for students, or with people in employment to help them achieve their potential.

Our mentoring projects are a mix of classic and peer mentoring but all have the same aim of improving the lives of their service users.

SMN is perceived as the voice of mentoring in Scotland and we connect our members through regional and thematic networks as well as via our website www.scottishmentoringnetwork.co.uk

This enables them to more easily share experiences and good practice.

We work strategically with the Scottish Government and others and are currently involved in two major national initiatives. The first is in a two year project where we are supporting six Public Social Partnerships to use mentoring to help reduce re-offending amongst women offenders and persistent young male offenders. The second is a project to provide long term mentors for children and young people who are looked after and who have been brought to the attention of social work and/or the police. These young people have historically the worst outcomes in terms of education and employment and many go on to become adult offenders or long term unemployed.

SMN offers a Project Quality Award successful completion of which demonstrates that a project is operating to a high standard. This is particularly useful to projects for discussion with stakeholders including funders. In addition we offer a qualification for mentoring Coordinators and two qualifications at different levels for mentors as well as customised training.