Mentoring: Creating a Culture of Empowerment

To be seen. To be heard. To be understood. To consistently receive attention and care. To have focused time from someone that you admire and respect. As humans, we require attention from other humans as much as we do air, water, food and sleep. If the quality of that attention is ‘secure’, meaning consistent, warm, focused, encouraging, then we thrive. It’s pretty simple, but much like caring for all living things it requires commitment and time.

The Mentoring Program at MPA that has grown and developed into the model that OCELOTL now trains and consults with others to adopt into their own, was first implemented by Youth Justice Institute (YJI) in 2003, where San Francisco State students were given forty hours of training as part of their practicum to then serve as a Mentor for an incarcerated youth in custody in San Francisco Juvenile Justice Center. This design was gifted to Robin Noel Morales, by the YJI founders to use their framework in creating a mentoring program for the students at Madison Park Academy (MPA).

In 2015, Robin had just begun serve the schools community by coordinating the mental health and SEL supports for the 700+ Middle and High School Students at MPA as the School Based Clinical Consultant with Alameda County Health Care Services’ Center for Healthy Schools. That year the request for services was overwhelming with almost 25% of the student population being referred by teachers and staff for support. Robin ran life skills groups, taught yoga to the athletic teams, met with teachers weekly, worked with the small group of school based clinicians and the health clinic, trying to grow the Tier One and Two level supports for students.

Students were struggling with the stressors impacting the adults around them; brand new teachers, new to the school and to Oakland, not having language or lived experience that would help them to build trust easily. They were aware of their parents struggles, living in a systemically oppressed community, impacted by illegal dumping, gang violence, racial tensions and a school administration that did not identify culturally with the majority of the families whose children they served. For the High School students, they also had a form of claustrophobia. In choosing to stay in the neighborhood for High School, they moved into a parking lot of temporary portable classrooms and did not have a new space to grow into who they were hoping to become as they began their positions as upper classmen. Where were the opportunities for them to be seen as leaders and to be respected? The small athletic department was able to foster some opportunities for leadership and Robin had built a bond with the football players as a ‘Yoga Coach’. When the school’s new Pathway (College and Career) coach approached Robin about creating an Internship for High School students, there was reluctance to take on another job at the school, but also the students in need of an opportunity for success, Robin knew well and the pull to make a space for them to grow and thrive won out. Let’s put this power into purpose.

In 2016, the MPA Mentoring internship class began, taught by Robin under the Pathway coach’s credential as Cultural Identity Development.

Robin took the framework of YJI’s forty hour training (based on CASA’s model for their training of volunteers) and created a six week course, using her own training in Counseling Psychology to create a curriculum digestible and accessible for High School students. The focus was to provide a framework for an internship in a helping profession, to have the knowledge of clinical frameworks and best practices, to understand confidentiality and be able to hold a ‘case load’ of two middle school students, with serious attention and focus on their well-being, and to be accountable to the program supervisor with regular documentation. In exchange, this small group of fourteen High School students became well versed in trauma informed best practices, brain development and attachment theory, they were engaged to discuss race, culture, gender and sexuality and the social constructs they bump up against in all of this. These students had the opportunity to reflect on their own experience as a middle schooler and how now as ‘experts of their own experience’ they might bring their insight and empathy to the students they would come to know and support just to Be a student. This initial group of 14 High School students served 28 sixth graders as their Mentors, meeting with them each week consistently, getting to know them, setting goals with them, playing games, talking through problems, having fun and keeping a day each week to look forward to for an hour that would just be for them. Now in 2022 in its 7th year, some of these sixth graders are now seniors and serving as Mentors for another middle school student.

This program works.

It grew into two full classes by the third year and by the fourth year was supporting the entire Middle School during lunch time with organized activities, and Mentors designing Community Engagement programming (Bianca Lorenz’s addition), providing orientations for the incoming 9th grade classes and with a growing alum of students moving into helping professions in both Mental Health and Education.

When we went into shelter in place, we continued to write letters and meet on line. The follow year, two full Mentoring classes continued to serve Middle Schoolers through ‘distanced learning’ and grow another program to support the Newcomer (International) student populations newly arrived to MPA.

The OCELOTL design for Peer to Peer Mentoring holds a framework that still reflects the seriousness and commitment required of an internship in a helping profession, where we teach the skill and hold the accountability of an entry level clinical position as a mental health professional.  The addition of the Community Engagement model brings both Social Work and education curriculum design into the program. Each year, as our students expand in their expertise, their lived experience of having been in this program is that they matter and are worthy of kind and loving attention. And so they have that to give and continue to amaze us with how they care for each other and the community they have created.