Mentoring or befriending
Mentoring is the right answer when the person has a goal that can be named, and befriending is the right answer when what has gone is other people. That is the distinction, and it is one of purpose rather than of warmth, seniority, age or setting.
Whoever is holding the referral: a coordinator deciding which of two waiting lists a person joins, a social prescribing link worker, or a family choosing between two near-identical services.
The person from being given the wrong relationship. This is a single decision, made early, and it determines dose, duration, supervision and how the match is judged.
Two matches fail for opposite reasons: a lonely person is set homework they never asked for, and a young person with one hurdle gets a weekly chat that tells him nobody expects anything of him.
A mentoring match exists to reach something outside itself. A befriending match is the thing itself. Everything else follows from which of those two sentences was true at the referral.
The comparison, line by line
Comparing the two properly means comparing what each promises, not how each feels. Both are structured, supported by an organisation, use volunteers and are one to one. The differences are in the rows below.
| Mentoring | Befriending | |
|---|---|---|
| Purpose | A named goal outside the relationship | The relationship itself |
| Who sets the agenda | The mentee, guided towards the goal by the mentor | Nobody, by design; whatever the hour turns into is the hour |
| What the volunteer brings | Relevant experience of the road ahead | Reliable attention and no agenda |
| Typical dose | About an hour a week | An hour a week or an hour a fortnight |
| Typical length | 12 months in youth schemes | 6 to 12 months, often open-ended |
| How it ends | At the goal, or at the planned date, with the ending worked through | Harder, because there is no natural finish line; the scheme must build one |
| What success looks like | The mentee did a specific thing, and can say what they did | The person’s week contains somebody, and they say they feel less alone |
| What failure looks like | An early ending, which is worse than no match at all | Dependence on a single volunteer with nothing behind them |
Two rows in that table are safeguarding rows rather than design preferences. Youth mentoring matches ending before three months are associated with outcomes worse than no match at all, reported by Grossman and Rhodes in 2002, and a befriending match with no review point can leave a person entirely dependent on one unsupervised volunteer.
The decision rule
The decision rule is one question asked of the person, not about them: can you name what you are trying to get to? If they can name it, and it is theirs rather than a professional’s ambition for them, the answer is mentoring. If they cannot, and what they describe is emptier rather than blocked, the answer is befriending. Three secondary tests settle most of the remainder.
- Ask what would count as this having worked. An answer with a verb in it (“I would have sat the exam”, “I would still be in the flat”) points to mentoring. An answer with a person in it (“someone would know how my week went”) points to befriending.
- Ask who is asking for it. Where the goal belongs to a school, a parent or a case manager and not to the person, a mentoring match will spend a year negotiating that fact. Fix the goal first or refer to befriending instead.
- Ask what is already there. Where a person has people but no direction, mentoring; where they have direction but no people, befriending. Where they have neither, deal with the loneliness first: a goal set with somebody entirely alone tends to collapse.
What getting it the wrong way round costs
Getting it the wrong way round wastes both people. Send a lonely older man to a goal-shaped programme and he will be asked, week after week, what he wants to work on. Send a seventeen-year-old with one concrete hurdle into befriending and she will get a pleasant hour with nobody who thinks she can clear it. Both look fine in the monitoring return. Both missed.
There is a cost to the scheme too: a befriending match carrying a hidden goal produces a volunteer who feels they are failing at something that was never their job, and volunteers who feel that leave.
A befriending match starts turning into casework
The befriender is filling in benefit forms, chasing a housing repair, arranging appointments or handling money. The befriender stops, does not take on the next one, and tells the coordinator the same day. The coordinator decides whether the person needs an advocate, a support worker or an adult social care assessment, makes that referral, and re-states the boundary to both people in writing. A befriender who becomes a caseworker is unsupervised, uninsured for the work and standing between the person and a service that has duties to them.
Where coaching sits in this comparison
Coaching sits next to mentoring rather than next to befriending, and it differs from mentoring on the domain of the goal and on the contract rather than on the shape of the purpose. Both work towards a goal the person can name. A coach works to a goal in a defined performance domain, does not need to have travelled the mentee’s road, and brings a method of questioning as their expertise. Coaching is usually bought, time-limited and contracted directly between two adults; volunteer mentoring is free to the mentee, runs longer, and is contracted through a scheme that holds the safeguarding. Offering coaching to a lonely person misreads the need entirely: a goal-directed method applied to an empty diary produces homework, not company.
When the answer changes mid-match
The answer changes mid-match more often than schemes admit, and the change should be made openly rather than by drift. A mentoring match that reached its goal in four months and is now a comfortable chat is doing befriending: close it and re-refer, or re-contract it as befriending with the person’s agreement. A befriending match where the person starts saying they want to get back to a class, or back to volunteering, has grown a goal, and deserves a mentoring-shaped conversation. Neither move is a failure. Failing to notice is.
The volunteer, mentor or befriender
- Knows which of the two they were recruited and trained for, and does not silently switch.
- Raises it with the coordinator when the match no longer matches its label.
- Declines tasks outside the agreed role rather than obliging and reporting it later.
The person supported
- Is told, in plain words at the first meeting, which of the two this is.
- Is asked what they want out of it, and has the answer written down as given.
- Can ask to change to the other kind of support, or to leave, without penalty.
The scheme decides mentoring or befriending at referral, records the reason in one sentence, and reviews that decision at least once during the match. A scheme that offers both and does not distinguish them on the referral form will measure both by whichever outcomes its funder asked for, and that is how the wrong relationship reaches the wrong person.