The relevance of the study is due to the need for a theoretical understanding of the experience of mentoring as a type of social work, and its practical application in the field of social protection of childhood, prevention of «secondary» orphanhood. The purpose of the article is to analyze the development of mentoring in boarding schools, identify key issues in the implementation of the mentoring program, study the best domestic and foreign experience, develop proposals for improving the organization and conduct of mentoring in Ukraine. The main methods used in the study are divided into theoretical (analysis, synthesis, comparison, generalization, modeling, classification) and empirical (document analysis, expert survey). An analysis of the domestic experience in organizing the mentoring process and the factors that slow it down. The analysis of documents was used in work with the letter of an assessment of needs of the child, the individual plan of work of the mentor, the standard agreement on mentoring. Thanks to the method of classification, the ways to improve the mentoring mechanism at the level of the Centers for Social Services for Families, Children and Youth, the state, and the coordination of interaction between government agencies become clear. The study found that mentoring as an alternative to adoption, which has been transformed from volunteering to social work since 2016, is an extremely effective tool for supporting children, important for stability, confidence and preparation for independent life of young men and women. It has been proven that there are factors that slow down the pace of mentoring for orphans and children deprived of parental care. Among them, the main ones are high «cost» (in time and human resources), inconsistency of actions of the main participants of the program, lack of large-scale information campaign.