Rec Sports
The Mentoring Partnership of SWPA turns 30! This story might just inspire you and your children to get involved.
What if every young person in the Pittsburgh region was lifted up by strong relationships with caring adults? Three decades ago, that’s the vision that gave rise to The Mentoring Partnership of Southwestern PA.
The Mentoring Partnership (TMP) helps make this vision a reality through their work with formal mentoring programs, community organizations, schools, youth sports leagues and more. Their goal? To create relationship-rich environments for young people.
Recently, Kidsburgh sat down with two people at the heart of TMP — long-time executive director Colleen Fedor, who is retiring this month, and Kristan Allen, who has served as associate executive director for many years and will take over as executive director in the new year.
If you’ve ever wondered about helping out as a mentor or about adding mentorship to your child’s life, this conversation is for you:
Kidsburgh: Draw us a picture of what was happening in 1995 when TMP was created.
Colleen Fedor: “In 1995, the U.S. Attorney in Pittsburgh was Fred Thieman, who was concerned about crime prevention, as compared to remediating or dealing with things after crime. So he convened the Youth Crime Prevention Council with a group of community leaders who cared about the challenges that young people face and they asked: How might we address the needs of children before crime happens? That was the beginning of The Mentoring Partnership. Through discussion, they identified three areas for focus: After-school programming, youth employment and mentoring. MENTOR: The National Mentoring Partnership was celebrating its fifth year, and they were forming affiliates around the country. Thankfully, the Heinz Endowments and Grable Foundation staffers saw this as an opportunity to really help. There was already a loosely convening group of mentoring programs and they were asked if capacity-building support would be valuable to their program(s). They voted 100% that yes, The Mentoring Partnership would be helpful to us.”
Kidsburgh: As the organization and its work in Pittsburgh has grown over these 30 years, how have you seen mentoring change kids’ lives?
Colleen Fedor: “There are so many examples. They range from kids who learn to golf and now are enjoying life with a sport and a mentor they never would have otherwise met to young people in their first jobs through Summer Learn and Earn and to Reading Buddies in local elementary schools. At this year’s Magic of Mentoring, Dr. Armani Davis shared his experience as a mentee while he was a student in the Steel Valley School District. Armani talked about how many members of the community surrounded him — including one who provided him with a job and a place to stay. From there, he met Greg Spencer who got to know him and has served as a mentor ever since. Armani is an incredible young man with a doctorate degree and a wonderful career at Johnson & Johnson. He expressed his gratitude for the people who saw the potential in him, who stood beside him and opened the doors that helped him as he navigated college and adulthood. And there are so many examples like that, kids who didn’t know careers existed, and yet they found their spark, and that became the opportunity to help them look further. There are examples of other kids, who may have been on the wrong path, but thanks to local violence prevention diversion programs were matched with a mentor who is there with a listening ear, an offer of support and more — helping them see that making better choices is a much better idea. So there are endless examples, big and small. It’s a powerful thing when someone cares about you — someone who isn’t paid and isn’t family, but who has the open-mindedness to listen to a young person and help them.”
Kristan Allen: “As a young person, or even as an adult, how amazing is it when someone sees you and wants to support you, just because they know you’ll do great things and the world will be a better place for it? Sometimes our work can be very challenging, in that we’re playing the long game. It’s not ‘Hey, this kid had a mentor for a few months and things might have gone one way for them, but now everything is good.’ Mentors tell us, ‘I don’t think I’m doing anything special. I’m just showing up.’ But it’s that consistent presence, that intentionality that you bring to being with the young person. Mentoring isn’t just a preventative measure that keeps kids on the right track. Mentoring is for all kids. Every young person can benefit from having adults in their sphere, and also peers, who take an interest, who listen, who take the time to see them for themselves and guide and listen. and the work belongs to all of us too, right? It’s not just one person, it’s not even just one organization. This is the collective work of all of us.”
Kidsburgh: Tell us about Everyday Mentoring®, which is related to the idea that this is the collective work of all of us.
Colleen Fedor: “Everyday Mentoring® is about connection, which has a whole lot of benefits. In school, kids who feel connected show up, they work harder, they have better performance, they have fewer disruptive challenges. When there are problems at school and the adults step back to understand, often we see that the kids having problems are not connected. Many years ago, connection happened more naturally. People didn’t move as often. All the neighbors knew you and you knew all the neighbors. Your parents would know about something before you even got home. That’s different now. Parents are working very hard and even in the best of scenarios, kids get lost. So mentoring is about connection, whether that’s formal connection as a one-on-one mentor in a small group program, or it’s about everyday mentors. Maybe it’s the crossing guard who sees a kid every day, twice a day, for 10 years, and knows their name. Crossing guards are consistent. They see kids, and if they take that time, and a young person feels like ‘this person looks out for me,’ the kid knows that might be a person they can go to. It matters if you acknowledge kids. Now, not all kids will want to talk to me or to you, but maybe one kid will. And so my ability to be present, be thoughtful and be a good listener and supporter is important. Many adults express concern that they may not know how to respond to a kid for every single thing that they bring up. Kids sometimes share things we don’t expect. So The Mentoring Partnership is ready to support with trainings and resources on our website. We also know that time is your most precious commodity. But you can show up for kids in many ways other than a one-on-one mentoring program. We have more opportunities than we realize to be valuable in kids’ lives. We just need to notice. And if we do, we may discover how rewarding that can be.”
Kidsburgh: How have you seen this experience change the lives of mentors?
Colleen Fedor: “You know, I had the opportunity to be a mentor to a little third grade boy. We were in RIF’s Reading Buddies program. It was hard to get there at the time. Some days, I’m running down Centre Avenue to get to the school, so I’m not late. Each time, he was very excited to see me. I didn’t think he would be, and yet there he was, waiting and smiling as I got there. He’d pick up the books and we’d talk about ‘Captain Underpants’ or build a puzzle, or whatever. But it was just time — him and I with no phones out and no distractions. It’s that undivided attention that is mutually beneficial. He valued it, he showed up to school on those days. We see that all the time: Kids who are mentored in a school program, for the most part, are less absent on the days that their mentors are there. How about that? It’s even true with high school students. They say, ‘The mentors choose to be here. They don’t have to be here, and we want to be here when they’re here.’ It changes your life to know that it matters to these kids. And watching Greg Spencer be so proud of Armani Davis at the Magic of Mentoring event, you could see it: Mentoring didn’t just change Armani’s life. It definitely changed Greg’s life, too.”
Kidsburgh: Be a Sixth-Grade Mentor, which became Be a Middle School Mentor, began in 2009. Tell us about why that was created and how it grew?
Colleen Fedor: Transitions for school districts are a challenge, no matter which grade or age. Middle school to high school is a transition challenge for many students so we see a number of schools choose to put a mentoring program in for that transition. But in this case, Pittsburgh Public said sixth grade was where they saw dramatic challenges in attendance and performance. So the district requested it and the mentoring providers in those buildings fully agreed that that was an area of need. But it was interesting: We started out calling the program Be a Sixth-Grade Mentor, but midway through that first year, we were like, ‘Well, what do we do next year?’ The mentors were saying, ‘Wait a minute, we want to stay connected.’ So we grew it to be all of middle school. We saw the desire of the mentors and mentees to remain connected. There was always that choice for adults and kids — you could bow out after your one year commitment, or you could stay committed. A greater percentage wanted to stay on than not. Many middle schools also offer peer mentoring. It’s a great thing, maximizing and utilizing the talent that you have already at your disposal, when high school kids mentor middle schoolers or your middle school kids mentor elementary. At some schools, the high school football players go down to the elementary school. Those are really valuable ways to harness the assets you have in the buildings and use them well. The importance is planning it out, training and preparing high school kids on how to do all of that. That’s where we help.”
Kidsburgh: Tell us how things have and haven’t changed over these 30 years. Are there similar challenges in kids’ lives and families’ lives? Where does mentoring fit in with that?
Colleen: “Adults may look at kids today and think, ‘I don’t know what to do with these kids today.’ But kids are kids. They want to feel needed and valued and heard and noticed and missed, just like we did at their age! At a time when we’re busier than ever, kids and adults, and because of our phones we don’t have to go to the library to get information or even go to the school building to ‘go to school,’ a kid can get lost. So that need for connection is, I think, actually greater than ever. But what all people need is no different. When we talk about the youth mental health crisis, we’re talking about loneliness and a sense of lack of purpose. Families need support and mentors — all kinds of mentors — provide that support. We all have a role to play.”