Youth Wise Mentoring is dedicated to providing young people with a trusted adult friend who will give them support, guidance, friendship, reinforcement, and a constructive personal example. The Mentees involved in our program also receive exposure to ways of serving their community and to different future career possibilities. We want to help young people develop the competence and character to grow up and become healthy, capable, and compassionate adults.

To facilitate the development of these special mentoring relationships, Youth Wise Mentoring pays particular attention to the development of its Mentors. We believe that if we build up our Mentors well, they will be better able to build up their Mentees. We want every Youth Wise Mentor to have the best possible chance for success with their Mentee. This is why we work hard to provide our Mentors with an exceptional support system. To learn more about our Mentor support system click here.

Outreach: Seeing the problems of so many of the youth in the northwest area of Seattle, Greg Ingle and a handful of concerned community members decided to create a way to reach out to the youth in the neighborhood. In July, 2005, Youth Wise was started as a faith-based 501(c)3 tax-exempt organization, and in October of that year the Youth Wise Outreach approach to reaching kids began in the Ballard neighborhood of Seattle. Youth Wise Outreach employed full-time youth leaders to 1) live and grow together in community (community living was offered but not required) and 2) volunteer and serve kids in the programs of the local neighborhood and schools. In this way the full-time Outreach leaders served as free labor to the community in order to help kids. We ended our Outreach model in June of 2016.

Mentoring: Over the years, it was noticed that what the kids in the community needed even more than group oriented youth programs was the consistent, one-on-one relationship of a caring adult friend. They needed someone to be consistently emotionally there for them. With many national studies and books on the subject available, it became evident that youth mentoring was the direction that Youth Wise needed to go. In 2014 the ground work for Youth Wise Mentoring began to be laid by designing a mentoring model that follows the Elements of Effective Practice for Mentoring provided by the National Mentoring Partnership.

In June, 2016, Youth Wise Mentoring was launched. Youth Wise Mentoring works in two ways: 1) it is a matching agency that directly matches kids with mentors and provides ongoing mentor training and supervision and 2) through its Mentoring Alliance it trains churches and organizations how to adopt the Youth Wise Mentoring model so they can become successful matching mentoring agencies (available in November, 2023).