Friday, January 4, 2013

No means...Yes!


One of the things that’s vitally important to the long-term success of our mentoring matches is that all parties involved—the adult volunteer, the youth, and the parent or guardian—have a willingness to commit to the relationship. This seems obvious enough, but for an organization with a longstanding partnership with the Juvenile Court, the question of consent versus constraint isn’t always so easy to sort out.

This fall, I was called into an intake interview with a young man who had been referred to us. His interviewer told me that DeVante had answered the very first question of the screening—“Do you want a mentor?—with an emphatic “No.” The interviewer had gone ahead with the rest of the intake before revisiting this most vital of all the questions we ask. Again, his answer was a firm “No.”

There’s a fine line between selling a young person on the many benefits of a mentoring relationship and backing him into a corner, pushing for a commitment hard enough that he’ll say whatever he feels he needs to say—whether he means it or not—to make the conversation end. I don’t like to toe that line.

I did give it one more shot, though, making sure he understood that a mentor is not a de facto probation officer, a parent, or someone else to get on his case and tell him what to do, but rather a role model, a listening ear, a friend.

He was resolute in his insistence that he didn’t want a mentor. I told him he was welcome to come to the weekly tutoring sessions anyway, and that I’d occasionally revisit this question with him. He agreed to this arrangement.

I was surprised to learn a few Tuesdays later that our Program Director had lined DeVante up for a match meeting with Kevin, one of our veteran mentors. Concerned that perhaps something had been lost in translation, I took DeVante aside and reminded him of our conversation a few weeks before. I assured him I had meant it when I promised we wouldn’t try to force him into a match.

I asked the question again: “Do you want a mentor?” Not all that much time had passed, but something had clearly changed for this young man. His determined “No” had turned into “It’s okay. I’ll give it a try.” And try he has.

Now a couple of months into his match, DeVante’s is one of the most familiar faces at the weekly tutoring sessions. Are he and his mentor consistently getting time together? In the case of some matches, I have to take the mentor’s and the teen’s word for it that they’re meeting regularly. In DeVante and Kevin’s case, though, all I have to do is show up on Tuesdays. They’re both almost invariably there, talking and laughing, sitting side by side working through an out-of-class reading assignment, happy to be together.

Willingness can take a person a long way.

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