Blog: Mentoring

Editor's Note: This post originally appeared on JJIE.org and is reprinted with permission.
Role: Mentor, Status: In Progress
It’s nearing 8:30 p.m. on a Thursday. A gorgeous 4-month-old girl with beautiful brown eyes and cocoa skin is monopolizing my time.
“London is 14 pounds now,” Danielle says. “The doctor says she’s thriving.”
Danielle, the real focus of my visit, is London’s mother and my mentee. Before we were matched nearly eight years ago, I was provided four details: She was 15 years old, lived in a group home, had anger management issues and was an avid reader. I’d taught teenagers, supervised a group home, instructed English to kids with anger management issues and loved to read since childhood. As much as a “soul mate mentee” could exist, Danielle was mine. My goals were to spend quality time with her and help her if I could.
Quality time has been everything from an evening at the movies to catching up while helping her move. Help has ranged from finding her a tutor to securing her a place to live. Through a friend, I found her housing after she returned from a semester of college at her dream school that left her saddled with debt. I felt relief but Danielle was crushed. The facility was a transitional group home and for someone who had clawed her way to Spelman through a rotation of high schools and more than 20 housing situations while in foster care, it felt as if her perseverance had been in vain; like it was punishment for completing her first year of college.
As is her way, she stuck it out and then created a better solution for herself. Danielle’s fierce independence has been one of the most rewarding and frustrating aspects of mentoring her. She often felt counted and tracked but rarely valued. At times, I worried if I contributed to this feeling. There is no roadmap to being a good mentor and although we “matched” in key demographics — black, female, born and raised in South L.A. — our 13-year age difference meant we were in very different stages of life. When I endured my own personal upheavals or transitioned into more demanding and time consuming employment, I remained within reach but did a poor job of initiating contact.
In the interim, Danielle kept inching forward. She did things on her own and alternately took my advice and disregarded it. I would vent my frustration at the latter but most of it was reserved for me. Was there something I could be doing that would make her take my more crucial advice seriously?
Somewhere along the way, I stopped making what she did or did not do a reflection of my mentoring and just loved her for who she was and whoever she was becoming. Today, Danielle is juggling her own apartment, re-enrolling as a junior in college and securing new employment. Between motherhood and a budding parental partnership with the child’s father, she has ventured into a life role that is divorced from my firsthand experience. While she has grown and matured as a young woman, I’ve had to improve as a mentor. I was never a replacement for her parents and learned through trial and error that I couldn’t be.
Being a mentor has made me aware that my role in her life has value but also limits. I am not a martyr, a savior or a caretaker to Danielle. I cannot give her what others owe her (a safe and secure childhood), but I can help her better navigate the life she does have. A purposeful mentor understands this, accepts it and reinforces it.
Yet old habits die hard. As I hold her daughter, I have concerns. How will she navigate being a mother? Like anyone else, she’ll use the cherished and terrifying experience of her own childhood to inform but not dictate her parenting. Danielle has been through hell and back, so she is uniquely qualified to protect her daughter from nightmares that most of us couldn’t even conjure up.
Of course there is much more to Danielle’s story, but it is not my job or my right to tell it. A good mentor understands this most of all. I’m not writing her story. I’m just helping with some of the more critical edits.

Jamie Ortiz is leaving a legacy of service in Ventura County Probation Agency, where caring adults are helping break the cycle of drugs, alcohol and crime.
Because of the relationships that Jamie has built, Reclaiming Futures Ventura County, CA, teens are connecting to mentors and educators.
Countless teens, like “JM”, are renewing their relationships with family and making positive contributions to their communities.
“JM” has continued the legacy of service by presenting to middle school students at Red Ribbon Week and helping other young people reclaim their futures.
We thank Jamie, who retires at the end of March, after 31 years of service. Jamie's contributions to Reclaiming Futures Ventura County, CA and these partnerships will last for generations.

Watching a music awards show on television recently, I was struck by the number of winners who enthusiastically thanked someone who mentored them. If these talented young men and women benefitted by having a mentor, imagine how much mentoring could help the many at-risk kids who each day face social and economic pressures to disengage.
January is National Mentoring Month, a reminder of both the value of mentoring and the pressing need for caring adults to step forward and become involved in helping our youth.

There are more than 5,000 mentoring programs serving an estimated three million youth in the United States today. This sounds impressive, yet those of us in the field realize we are only scratching the surface when it comes to meeting the needs of at-risk youth -- youth who are struggling academically and socially because they lack caring adult guidance and support. An estimated 15 million young people nationwide are in need of a mentor. And the stakes are high: nationally, one out of four high school students will drop out this year.

According to a Global Youth Justice report, mentoring is the ideal way to rehabilitate justice-involved youth. Mentoring has emerged as a low-cost delinquency prevention and intervention option that capitalizes on the resources of local communities and caring individuals. “Mentoring programs can build proactive tendencies and improve young lives and, eventually, adult productivity in ways that the Juvenile Justice settings leave youth impacted and deterred from guidance,” states the report.
Although 26 states in the United States have developed mentoring programs, there are different pathways to mentoring for each of the juvenile justice services and basic qualifications a justice-involved teen must meet to participate.
Teens in the juvenile justice system can be referred to one of the following services:

• Teen/Youth Court has diversion and mentoring programs which are administered on a local level by law enforcement agencies and probation departments.
• Delinquency Court is commonly associated with juveniles who have committed a crime, offense, and/or violation and a juvenile’s actions are confined to the jurisdiction of the Delinquency Court.
• Dependency Court is associated with foster care, abuse and neglect issues involving youth and youth decisions are monitored and administered by the state. Often youth appear in Dependency and Delinquency Court simultaneously.
• Juvenile Correction is considered a high-security facility for long-term and safe custody of juveniles having committed a felony or multiple misdemeanors with the continuum of services and mentoring referral determined by state statute.
• Juvenile Detention is a secure residential facility providing temporary and safe, usually 72 hours or less, custody of juveniles who have been restricted to an environment with the juvenile services and referrals determined by the jurisdiction/private entity operating the facility.
• Juvenile Probation provides supervision and monitoring to youth under the jurisdiction of the court, and probation officers have the ability and jurisdiction to determine services and supports for the youth and his/her family needs.

Editor's note: This story is part of a 10-part investigative series: Lessening the impact of incarceration in Oakland.
Nick Smith was shuttled from high school to high school in recent years, whenever a relative died or was shot.
When his mother died of cancer three years ago he moved from San Ramon Valley High School to San Leandro High so he could live with his older brother. When his brother was shot and killed, he moved to Oakland to live with another brother. By the time he got to Oakland Technical High School his senior year, he discovered he hadn't taken enough core academic courses to graduate. Nobody had counseled him to take the right classes; indeed he did not have any adult in his life he could turn to for advice.
“Teachers can’t interpret a student’s situation," Smith said of what it was like to be in school during all the rocky and sad events of the past few years. "They didn’t know what was going on.”
Adding to the wounds, staff at some of the high schools did not seem to expect much from him or care one way or another what happened to him.

I believe all young people can succeed.
The professionals, community members and other caring adults in Snohomish County, Washington agree.
Annie Mulligan and other generous artists in Snohomish County are mentoring young photographers through a program called Promising Artists in Recovery (PAIR), modeled after Reclaiming Futures. The PAIR program connects teens in the county's juvenile justice system with local artists. This powerful work introduces young people, like Ayrton Clements, to mentors along the road to success. Ayrton’s photography appears at right.
The second installment of this three-part series in was featured July 16, 2012 in The Herald of Everett, Wash.

Discuss the impact of mentoring on at risk youth Wednesday June 13th between 12:30-12:45
Please join Reclaiming Futures King County Community Fellow Hazel Cameron of the 4C Coalition in a live chat hosted by The Seattle Times.

Here's the lineup:
12 p.m. to 12:15 p.m. Seattle Police Department.
12:15 p.m. to 12:30 p.m. Prometheus Brown, also known as George Quibuyen, wrote a song about the shootings in a Sunday Seattle Times guest column. Check out his video and lyrics here.
12:30 p.m. to 12:45 p.m. Hazel Cameron is executive director of the 4C Coalition, which mentors at-risk youth. Editorial writer Lynne K. Varner wrote about mentoring as a way to protect the public from street violence.
12:45 p.m. to 1 p.m. Andrew J. Swanson is a musician and Cafe Racer regular who wrote a moving op-ed about the friends he lost in the shooting and how we can honor them.
Join the chat. Please share comments or questions about mentoring.