The First Mentor

Schools Building Communities was pleased to read that Michelle Obama has begun a leadership and mentorship program for young women, directly out of the White House. She wants young people to understand that those in the nation’s House care about their development.

Each student will be paired with a White House staffer, with the likes of Valerie Jarrett, Melody Barnes and Desiree Rogers being involved. The First Lady will not be assigned a specific mentee, but will meet with all involved.

“We’ve got the most powerful seat in the land to be a bridge-builder,” she told the nearly two dozen high school girls, who were picked based on need by their principals. “And I’m so excited and touched and moved to have you all here.”

Among the reasons for SBC’s excitement is that we are incubating our own mentoring project called MentWorks. It is designed to connect students from Ivy League schools with young people enrolled in high-need urban schools.

Among the things we have learned in our pursuits, thanks to The MENTOR organization which has been studying this field for nearly two decades, is that three million young Americans are in formal, high-quality mentoring relationships. But nearly five times that number of students need or want mentoring, leaving an enormous mentoring gap.

And the deck is particularly stacked against underrepresented minority and economically disadvantaged students with college aspirations. Fewer than nine percent of the students at Tier 1 colleges come from the bottom half of the income distribution and that small group is afflicted with a high dropout rate among freshmen. Ultimately, fewer than one in two will earn a college diploma with that decision to drop out having lifelong and generational ramifications.

“Poor and low-income youths often have few models within their families or neighborhoods to help expose them to the rules of the game for education and career development,” said Dr. Michael J. Nakkula, now a professor in the Graduate School of Education at the University of Pennsylvania and an advisor to MentWorks.

“Universities, and university students who can serve as guides or models, are critical to the opportunity structure for young people,” said Dr. Nakkula. “Having grown up as a low-income youngster myself, I was fortunate to have one uncle who went on to college. That made all the difference in the world for me. But most of my friends didn’t have such influences and the outcomes for them were very different.”

As we proceed with our MentWorks venture, which has gotten support from two of the Ivy League schools already, we will announce developments here at SBCWorks.