Community for Youth mentoring

[kingrat]

From 10 til 2 yesterday I attended an orientation class for mentoring for Community for Youth. I thought it was a training class, but it was more recruiting oriented. They say they've been coming up short in the last couple of years in the number of mentors, so they added the orientation to get more people in. Rather than start with training, they get people who are just interested into the orientation and feed those that come out of it interested into the training.

So essentially the progream is several initial events, the real training, a pre-launch, a weekend at a camp, and one or two other things. Then after that it's weekly time and whatever else you want to do with your kid. The program is all about goal setting. All the kids and all the mentors are supposed to set a goal for the school year. Something like a 4.0 G.P.A. or making the baseball team or getting a job. The mentors probably have goals a little less school oriented, or possibly college oriented. Getting into grad school, getting to a certain weight, getting a girlfriend. Yep, that last one was mentioned even. Erin mentioned to me that it might be a good place to meet women. She was right, and they even encourage it. Well, as long as it's not one of the students. Obviously, that's verboten. The other thing they emphasized is keeping your word 100% of the time. If you don't show up, the kid will not show up.

Anyway, I'm all signed up for the training. And I'll likely be mentoring a kid from Sealth.

Comments

[c-dawg.livejournal.com]

This is awesome, Phil.
I volunteer through the YMCA for literacy, but have been considering doing something along these lines. Just out of curiousity - how are the "youth" selected? Are they interested in being mentored, or is it something that's forced upon them? I ask because of the flake factor I'm finding through the Y. Yeah, it's summer, and nobody wants to do 'homework', but I don't want to become disenchanted w/ the whole idea just because of a few lazy kids. (More often than not, I show up and the kid doesn't show.)

[kingrat]

They get about 100 applications for about 30 openings from kids. After that they have some process to see which students will show up and which won't, and they accept only those who are going to show up. Something like 85% of the kids stick with it through the year.