January

January is two screening problems wearing one month

MLK Day of Service sends sixty strangers through your door for a single morning. National Mentoring Month hands you six adults who will sit alone with a child every week for the next two years. Same month, opposite risk, and most organizations run the same process for both. Screen either for $5.

Start screening — free to set up Mentoring screening guide

All 50 state registries + NSOPW · Results in minutes · Automatic rescreen cycles · FCRA-compliant

Wide and shallow, or narrow and deep

These two waves need different answers. Treating them the same is how programs end up over-screening a paint crew and under-screening a mentor.

The MLK Day surge

Sixty people you have never met, confirmed in the last ten days.
Corporate teams and student groups who signed up as a block, not as individuals.
A single shift — so the instinct is to skip screening entirely.
Roles assigned on the morning, based on who actually showed up.

Answer: sort projects by unsupervised access, screen only those, and keep a bench of supervised roles for everyone else. The same approach works for September days of service.

The mentoring intake

One adult, one child, alone together, repeatedly, for a year or more.
The relationship is the point — supervision would defeat it.
A handful of volunteers, not sixty. Depth matters more than throughput.
The screening standard is the highest you will apply all year.

Answer: screen every mentor, verify references by phone, and put them on a rescreen cycle. Depth here costs you almost nothing — it is six checks, not sixty.

What a real mentor intake looks like

A full intake at an established program commonly runs four to six weeks. We are two steps of six — and honestly, not the two that do the most work. Here is the whole stack, marked for what we handle.

1
Written application
Role history, references, motivation. Your form, your questions — this is where most disqualifications actually surface.
2
In-person interview
Not replaceable by any vendor. A conversation tells you things no database will.
3
Criminal + sex-offender search
We do this
National criminal search across county, state and federal sources, all 50 state registries plus NSOPW. This is the part we do, for $5, usually in minutes.
4
Reference verification
Call them. Programs that skip this step are the ones that later wish they had not.
5
Youth-development training
Boundaries, mandatory reporting, what to do when a match goes wrong.
6
Ongoing re-screening
We do this
A one-year-old clearance says nothing about the last twelve months. Set a rescreen cycle and let it run automatically.

Do not let the check replace the interview. A clear result means nothing matched in our sources — it is not a character reference, and the overwhelming majority of people who should not be matched with a child have no record at all. The interview and the reference calls are what catch those. What our search does and does not cover is spelled out in the Trust Center.

The clearance you ran in January 2026 says nothing about 2027

Mentoring is the one volunteer role where the relationship keeps going long after the check went stale. Programs that screen once at intake and never again are running on a document, not on information.

Set a rescreen interval once — most programs use one or two years, some insurers ask for annual — and the reminders go out on their own. You approve, the volunteer re-consents, and the roster stays current without anyone tracking dates in a spreadsheet.

How rescreening works Mentoring screening guide

Minutes, not weeks

The search itself is fast. Your interview and references are the real timeline — as they should be.

Automatic cycles

Set the interval once; reminders fire on schedule for every mentor on the roster.

Funder-ready records

Consent, disclosure and result history in one place — what a grant report actually asks for.

January questions

When is MLK Day of Service?

The third Monday in January, alongside the federal holiday. It is one of two federally recognized national days of service in the United States — the other is the September 11 National Day of Service — and AmeriCorps has led the MLK effort for more than twenty-five years. The framing most organizers use is “a day on, not a day off.”

Do one-day MLK Day volunteers need background checks?

It depends entirely on the role, not the duration. A volunteer painting a community center or sorting a warehouse alongside twenty other people does not need a check. A volunteer tutoring a child, riding a delivery route, or working a shift at a shelter does. Sort your projects by unsupervised access before you sort them by anything else.

What is National Mentoring Month?

January has been designated National Mentoring Month by Congress and successive Presidents every year since 2002. In practice it is the single biggest mentor-recruitment push of the year, which means it is also when programs onboard the largest batch of adults who will spend unsupervised one-on-one time with a young person.

How long does mentor screening usually take?

A full mentor intake — application, interview, background check, references and training — commonly runs four to six weeks at established programs. The criminal and sex-offender search is not what makes it slow; that part typically comes back in minutes. The interview, references and training are the real timeline, and they are worth every day they take.

What should a mentoring background check include?

At minimum a national criminal database search and a sex-offender registry search. Every $5 VolunteerBadge check covers a national criminal search across county, state and federal sources, all 50 state sex-offender registries plus the national registry (NSOPW), and federal watchlists. Many programs also add a motor vehicle check where mentors will be driving a youth.

How often should mentors be re-screened?

Most programs run on a one- to two-year cycle, and some insurers require annual. Because a mentoring match is ongoing and unsupervised by design, this is the volunteer population where a stale clearance carries the most risk. You can set a rescreen interval once and let the reminders run rather than tracking dates by hand.

Can we screen a corporate group that signed up as a block?

Yes. Import the roster and every person gets their own application link and their own consent — a group sign-up does not create group consent, and FCRA requires an individual disclosure and authorization from each person. Many corporate partners reimburse the $5, or you can switch on volunteer-pays for that campaign.

We are a small program with six mentors. Is this worth setting up?

Setting up an organization is free and there is no subscription, so six checks costs $30 total. The setup is worth more than the screening at that size: you get consent records, a roster, and automatic rescreen reminders — the documentation a funder or insurer asks for, which is usually the thing small programs cannot produce.

Planning further out? The volunteer screening calendar covers every season, and tutoring programs face nearly the same one-on-one question as mentoring.

Start the year with the roster in order

Create your organization free, screen your January intake, and set the rescreen cycle once. $5 a volunteer, credits never expire.

Get started free

Questions first? Trust Center · How it works · Pricing