Why Mentorship Beats One-Off Charity

There is a kind of charity that photographs beautifully and changes very little. Someone successful arrives, speaks to a hall of students about believing in yourself, poses for a picture, and leaves. The students go back to exactly the situation they were in that morning.

Mentoring works on a different mechanism, and the mechanism is boring. It is a person who keeps turning up.

Most young people who drift out of education do not decide to leave. They miss a stretch, fall behind, stop seeing themselves as someone who finishes things, and by the time anyone official notices, the student has already gone. Nobody was watching closely enough to catch it at the point where catching it was cheap.

A mentor is a person whose actual job is to notice. That is most of the value right there, and it explains why continuity matters more than the mentor's resume. A mentor of average accomplishment who calls every fortnight for two years does more good than a spectacular one who visits in March.

It also explains why we ask volunteers for reliability before anything else. If you can commit to regular contact, you are useful. If you can only manage a one-off inspirational appearance, we would honestly rather have the donation.

JEPF's team includes educators and alumni of Howard University, the University of Maryland, and Georgetown University, and several team members work as substitute teachers at area high schools including High Point, Roosevelt, and Northwestern. Those are our backgrounds, not partnerships with those institutions. What they mean in practice is that the people building this have been in front of teenagers recently enough to remember how quickly a kid decides an adult is not serious.

Mentoring is also the cheapest thing we do. It is not free, because coordination, travel and materials cost money and because a relationship that nobody is administering quietly lapses. But per pound spent it is the best value in youth work, which is why we want it running permanently out of the leadership training center rather than depending on who happens to be available in a given year.

If you can commit to regular contact with a young person, we would like to hear from you.