Someone else just accepted my invitation to guest post on this blog! Among other things, he is a beloved manager and insightful mentor and I’m hoping that he can write something about the qualities that he looks for in his proteges, and perhaps a little bit about how he works Read more…
[For Sabrina] Tisch Office of Career Development (TOCD) provides students in the arts with very specialized services that the Wasserman Center is not equipped to offer. There is, for starters, the fact that creative resumes look very different from the standard resume organized primarily by experience. But the primary challenge of sending Tisch grads out into the world is preparing them for non-linear career trajectories. To this end, TOCD offers two main resources: career counseling and a mentor network. (more…)
Part of my consulting work for NYU’s diversity and inclusion team allows me to learn about different mentoring opportunities across the university’s schools and divisions. Yesterday I had a terrific conversation with Leah Lattimore, Associate Director of Multicultural Programs at NYU’s Wasserman Center for Career Development, about their Mentor Network. Read more…
This has been a tough week for a lot of my friends and colleagues, but what is getting many of us through has been time spent in the company of like-minded, big-hearted people. Just as it’s vital for young people to have caring adults in their lives, it continues to Read more…
[Obligatory apologies for neglecting this blog.] I’ve been meaning to write about an idea coming out of the Adoptment program to bring more structure into their mentoring sessions. The group has recently handed over the planning of one session to each mentor/mentee pair. Aside from allowing young people to take more responsibility Read more…
I’ve been thinking of ways of making my identity self-portrait activity a bit more rigorous. The results from the pilot were useful because it revealed what young people tended to leave out of their portraits when representing their identities. In an earlier post I mentioned how I really had to Read more…
One of the things I love talking to young people about is their budding identities. There are a couple of Zits comic strips that I like to use to explore the theme. One of them involves Jeremy standing before a mirror, assuming different flavors of masculinity, only to turn into a little boy when his mom catches him in the act. Seeing Jeremy try on different identities is a great way to get a conversation started about identity exploration. We all “try on” different identities or emphasize certain aspects of ourselves at different times, and it can be a bit awkward and embarrassing when someone calls us out on it—especially when we are in our teens.
When I ran a discussion on identity for a writing workshop, we kept the group discussion on a largely abstract level, and then I had the youth write about their personal experiences afterward. With the mentoring group I work with, however, I redesigned the activity as a partner exercise with youth and their mentors. Each young person would write a list of the most important elements in his identity, and then represent that visually in his self-portrait. During presentations, the group would then respond to the portrait, by commenting on what was interesting or surprising about it, or naming other characteristics that they thought were fundamental to the presenter’s identity.
To model the exercise, I very quickly sketched out an impromptu identity self-portrait. Do pardon the scrawl: (more…)
I just got off the phone with someone from Mentoring USA to find out if she had any words of wisdom for mentoring older youth/young adults. As it happens, Mentoring USA is trying to develop their own program for that demographic, since one of their interests is to help youth age Read more…
According to a study by the EMT Group, the national outcomes of youth leaving foster care are as follows:
- 75% work below grade level
- 60% of girls have a child within 4 years
- 50% do not complete high school
- 45% are unemployed
- 33% are arrested
- 30% are on welfare at ages 18–24
- 26% spend time in jail or prison
- 25% are homeless
- 10% are on probation
If handled properly, a mentoring relationship can boost the outcomes for youth who have been in the foster care system. Though results are uneven, researchers have indicated that youth who have been mentored for at least two years between the ages of 14 and 18 are more likely than their unmentored peers to report overall health, and are at a lower risk for STDs, violence, suicidal thoughts, and other dangers. Statistics for participation in higher education and vocational training also seem to promise a significant monetary ROI for mentoring programs.
Here is the caveat you knew to expect: program managers should tread carefully, for a mentoring relationship can cause significant harm if set up improperly. (more…)
I’ve found that the surest way to paralysis at the beginning of a project is to get caught up with concerns of assessment and scalability. This isn’t to say that we can conduct programs willy-nilly. Rather, I think a case can be made for tabling those issues in favor of designing innovative programs that seek to address the immediate concerns of a specific population. Let me explain. (more…)