What Makes a Good Youth Mentor

People assume mentoring requires a mentor worth emulating, and then disqualify themselves for having an ordinary career. That gets the requirement backwards.

Reliability is the whole job. A mentor who is moderately interesting and always there beats a remarkable one who reschedules. Young people who have been let down by adults are testing for exactly this, usually without saying so, and they conclude fast.

Comfort with silence helps more than people expect. A lot of mentoring is a young person saying very little for twenty minutes and then saying the real thing at the end. Volunteers who need the conversation to go well tend to fill that space and lose the thing that was coming.

Curiosity beats advice. The instinct is to solve, and mentors who solve immediately train the young person to stop bringing them anything complicated. Asking what they have already tried is slower and works better.

Being unshockable matters. A young person will eventually test whether you will still be there after they tell you something. Reacting strongly, even sympathetically, often ends the disclosure.

Knowing your limits is part of it. A mentor is not a therapist, a social worker or a source of money. Good mentors are quick to say they do not know and quick to hand something to somebody qualified. Pretending otherwise is how volunteers burn out and how young people get bad advice from a trusted source.

JEPF's team includes educators and alumni of Howard University, the University of Maryland and Georgetown University, and several members work as substitute teachers at area high schools including High Point, Roosevelt and Northwestern. Useful background, but none of it is the qualification. The qualification is that you keep turning up.