All people sometimes encounter certain challenges and obstacles in their lives. Regardless of the strength and duration of the challenge and the area of life affected by it, everyone has a common need for formal or informal help and support in order to face difficulties and overcome them as successfully as possible. Social workers are a source of formal support for socially sensitive social groups. The aim of this final thesis, based on available research, is to determine the advantages of the social mentoring service for each individual group of users to whom the service can be recognized according to the Croatian law on social welfare, and on the basis of these advantages to establish the importance of social mentoring for the Croatian social welfare system. The results of the research papers show that the social mentoring service enables a comprehensive partnership between social workers and users focused on a specific user problem and that it has an exclusively positive effect specific to each individual group of users to whom it can be provided. The shortcomings of the implementation of the service are related exclusively to the unfavorable working conditions of social workers in terms of work overload and to structural problems regarding the uneven distribution of opportunities and services among Croatian counties.