It's the end of National Mentoring Month and there are 15 million kids on waiting lists across the United States who hope to have a mentor. This posting, however, is not the perhaps anticipated plea that you consider these numbers of desolate, waiting youth and finally take up the banner to become a mentor yourself (although you might want to!)
It is, to the contrary, a plea for a fundamental change in the American mentoring model. Certainly it should be clear by now that in a nation of increasing "parentlessness" we are NEVER going to have enough adult mentors to provide all these youth with the positive attention and support they need so badly by adhering the one-on-one, adult- mentor to youth-mentee model.
Therefore, let's do something else. The main mentors in the United States should be teens -- and, moreover, they should be should teens who live in the same communities and have the same problems and challenges as the generally low-income kids most in need of mentors. We have been so relentlessly taught to think of youth in poor communities only as youth who require help that, within this, we rarely consider what they can contribute their own community.
Having for many years run a mentoring program focused on training teens whose parents have AIDS -- or have died -- to be mentors for younger kids in the same difficult situation -- I have to say that I've learned over and over that tapping the leadership potential of teens who have, themselves, been pushed far outside society produces extraordinary results.
In the first place, these teen mentors really understand the problems their young mentees are going through. They are very responsible; they pick up the younger kids at their homes, bring them back home after mentoring meetings. In years of field trips, we've never had a single incident or lost a single child. Finally, of course, this model means that two groups of kids -- the teens and their young mentees -- are receiving help and support through one mentoring program. Teens with the sadly routine problems of youth in low-income communities -- a parent with AIDS, or in prison or, themselves, being in foster care -- often are incredibly isolated and depressed. By becoming a mentor, they gain not just a community -- but a community where they fully see that they have an important role.
We started our Kids-Mentoring-Kids Program at Health People, the Bronx community health organization I head, out of total desperation in the early years of AIDS when mothers with AIDS asked us to please "do something" for their kids. With these mothers at the time usually dying within a year of an AIDS diagnosis, we knew we couldn't obtain adult mentors; when it was suggested to me to try the teens as mentors; I have to admit I had doubts -- which were quickly proven wrong. Another important aspect of this teen program is that, while the mentees have assigned mentors who give them special support, we undertake group activities. In one-on-one mentoring programs, if a mentor, for whatever reason, stops being a mentor, the mentee is left stranded. Here, the mentee stays part of the program until assigned a new mentor.
When we started our Kids-Mentoring-Kids program, we couldn't find reports anywhere else of people trying this mentoring model. Now, I've read of a few similar programs -- for example, using teens in foster care as mentors for younger kids in foster care.
Nonetheless, it's still very hard to get a program like this funded. For some reason, grantors don't take it quite seriously, as though it just couldn't be possible (even though we have extensive evaluation) that teens who are so widely regarded as the problem could, indeed, be central to the solution. So all those kids by the millions are waiting and waiting -- and, without a new model that produces more mentors, will always wait.
Well, if you'd like to hear from a few teen mentors, please go to http://www.youtube.com/user/AIDSmyfamilyandme.
There you will meet mentors like Iretta, who after being shuffled through multiple foster homes and the death of her mother, ended up in a psyche ward before she was a teenager. Today, she is taking pre-college courses and will enroll in college next year. There is also Thomas who, with a mother very sick from AIDS for years, had to take adult responsibility in his family; after a tour in Iraq as a medic, he is thankfully back in the Bronx, going to Fordham University, and being a living inspiration to many other kids.
And, finally, you will meet Yannik McKie who contacted us a few months ago to help guide him in starting a similar mentoring program in Atlanta, where he now lives. Yanik, orphaned at 14, was one of the first kids in the United States to lose both his parents to AIDS; angry and despairing, by his 20s, he was in federal court on drug- and gun-running charges. Now he wants to use his experience for youth like himself, and no doubt he will do an outstanding job.
Orphaned, gun-running, federal charges -- yes, it's time to say, here are the mentors America needs.