Dr. Torie Weiston-Serdan is a scholar and practitioner with over 13 years of teaching and youth programming experience. An emerging leader in the youth mentoring field, she wrote Critical Mentoring: A Practical Guide, which has become the handbook for culturally sustaining youth work in the discipline. Outside of teaching and research, Weiston-Serdan runs the Youth Mentoring Action Network, a non-profit dedicated to leveraging justice and equity mentoring. Through her community-based work, she mentors Inland Empire youth through high school into college and careers. She also works extensively with other community-based organizations in support of their youth advocacy efforts, specializing in training mentors to work with diverse youth populations: i.e. Black, Latinx, LGBTQQ, first-generation college students and low-income youth.  As a scholar, she examines how marginalized and minoritized youth are served by mentoring and youth development programs. Weiston-Serdan currently serves on the Big Brothers Big Sisters LGBTQ National Advisory Council and the Research Board of the National Mentoring Resource Center.