Our after-school mentorship club meets weekly, and a typical session is less structured than the name might suggest. The first half hour is usually homework support, whatever a participant is stuck on that week. The second half is more open: a life-skills topic, a group discussion, or simply conversation.
What we've found is that the specific content of a session matters less than the consistency of it. Participants know the same mentors will be there every week, at the same time, in the same place, which builds a kind of trust that a one-off talk or workshop rarely manages.
Several mentors have become the adult a participant turns to first with a problem, a school issue, a decision, a family disagreement, precisely because the relationship was built slowly over many ordinary sessions rather than delivered in a single memorable one.