Extending the Hand of Friendship

As mentor programs take off, groups examine what works best

In Philadelphia, 60 black churches are on a crusade to recruit adult congregation members to offer friendship, support, and guidance to 700 inner-city children.

At the Hewlett-Packard Company, more than 1,500 employees are using electronic mail to correspond regularly with schoolchildren across the country, helping them with academic pursuits and getting them to think about how they can turn their interests into possible careers.

At more than a dozen hospitals nationwide, hundreds of employees are taking high-school students under their wing, offering friendship and helping the students decide whether they want to prepare for jobs in health care.

Those organizations are joining a growing list of charities, businesses, and other groups that have come up with creative new ways to pair adult role models with children and adolescents. Many of the so-called mentor programs are motivated by a growing body of research that shows that children who establish relationships with adult volunteers are more successful in school and socially than those who do not.

The mentor movement received a major lift last spring when organizers of the Presidents’ Summit for America’s Future, a meeting of top political, business, and charity leaders designed to mobilize volunteers to help children, announced that they would seek to recruit two million mentors by the end of 2000.

If the summit organizers succeed, they will expand the ranks of adult volunteers working with youngsters significantly. By some estimates, 350,000 kids are enrolled in programs that provide them with adult companionship. But even if those volunteers materialize, they will fall far short of meeting the needs youngsters have for adult guidance. As many as 13 million disadvantaged children would benefit from being linked with an adult volunteer, charity leaders say.

“The weakness of mentoring has always been that it helps far too few kids,” says Allan Luks, executive director of the New York affiliate of Big Brothers/Big Sisters of America. The national organization matches 105,000 children to adult mentors each year. But an additional 30,000 children remain on the group’s waiting lists.

The challenge is not just to recruit adults to serve as mentors, but to get them to stick with it. As many as seven out of ten mentor relationships fail, experts say, because the adults are not adequately trained and don’t receive enough guidance from charity officials on what to expect and how to cope with problems or complications that may arise in the relationship.

Gary Walker, president of Public/Private Ventures, a social-policy research organization in Philadelphia that studies mentor programs, says that many volunteers have unrealistic expectations about the experience.

“We’ve seen a lot of people becoming mentors because they thought the job of the mentor was to change the life of the kid and to do it fast,” he says. “In a situation like that, the kid just clams up.”

Mentor programs have few critics, but some experts worry that their popularity could keep people from realizing that they are not a panacea for healing all the problems that afflict kids.

“This isn’t going to solve every kid’s problem,” says Mr. Walker.

Such concerns have not deterred the organizations that responded to the Presidents’ Summit for America’s Future.

United Airlines, for example, has promised to recruit 2,000 of its employees to serve as mentors in 120 cities. So far, the company has started programs in Chicago; Denver; Los Angeles; Newark, N.J.; New York; San Francisco; and Seattle. It held one meeting in Chicago last July to recruit volunteers and has two more planned. The company is also considering publishing a brochure about mentor programs and making it available to passengers on United Airlines flights.

Concerned Black Men, a national charity that recruits black men to be role models for black boys, pledged to start 50 new chapters to provide mentors for up to 200,000 youths. So far, two new chapters are being organized, says Dan Henderson, the national chairman.

At least 66 additional companies, charities, foundations, and other organizations have pledged to start or expand mentor programs.

The price tag for carrying out the summit goals will be high. Geoffrey T. Boisi, co-chairman of One to One/the National Mentoring Partnership, a Washington charity, estimates that it would cost about $200-million to successfully recruit, train, and match the two million mentors that were promised through the Presidents’ Summit.

Mr. Boisi, a senior partner at the Beacon Group, a New York investment firm, and founder of several mentor programs himself, is working with other non-profit leaders to persuade more foundations to help foot the bill and pay for the day-to-day costs of such programs.

“Foundations have been great about funding studies and start-up sites,” he says. “What we need now is funding of the apparatus to connect the resources at the local level with the organizations and institutions working directly with the kids. That’s the piece of the puzzle that has to get funded and strengthened, because that’s where it happens.”

Meanwhile, America’s Promise, the non-profit group led by Gen. Colin Powell and charged with carrying out the goals of the summit, has established a “commitments team” to insure that organizations are on track to meet the goal of recruiting volunteers to serve as mentors.

But the organization has been slowed in its quest by internal unrest — it has changed executive directors twice since the summit. Summit organizers have promised to issue an update on the status of the commitments by the end of this month.

Much of the faith being placed in mentor programs stems from a Public/Private Ventures study of Big Brothers/Big Sisters, a disciplined program in which one adult and one child spend several hours a week together over a long period — usually more than a year. During that time, a friendship is allowed to develop gradually.

The study found that children with mentors were less likely to start using drugs and alcohol or become violent than children without mentors. Their performance in school also improved.

But the study, released in 1995, also found that the Big Brothers/Big Sisters programs are expensive to run — up to $1,000 per mentor relationship. That money is used primarily to pay staff members who screen potential volunteers to make sure that they do not have criminal backgrounds or other problems. Another big expense comes in training and supporting those who are selected.

While the careful selection and training procedures are widely considered to be a key reason that Big Brothers/Big Sisters has been so successful, many charity leaders believe that less costly and time-consuming alternatives can work just as well.

“Kids can benefit from all kinds of mentoring relationships as long as you identify the needs of the child and build your program around those needs, ” says Martin Jacks, executive director of the Mentoring Center, an Oakland, Cal., charity that helps groups start mentor programs.

A national coalition of 32 groups that work with children — including Big Brothers/Big Sisters, Camp Fire Boys and Girls, and Girl Scouts of the USA — is currently trying to outline which elements every mentor program needs. The goal is to make it easier for charity leaders to figure out how best to decide which costs are essential and which can most easily be sacrificed in the interest of saving money and time. The study, which is financed by a $1.2-million grant from the Department of Education, will also assess the effectiveness of existing programs.

In the meantime, mentor groups of all kinds are looking for ways to expand the number of children they serve. Big Brothers/Big Sisters is undertaking major changes to help its program become more efficient.

It is streamlining its selection process so that it will take less time to match adults with children. It is forming new partnerships with other groups so that those groups can offer mentor programs that adhere to Big Brothers/Big Sisters standards. And it is actively recruiting volunteers — at businesses, civic clubs, and other non-profit organizations — rather than wait for would-be volunteers to call.

Other groups are coming up with new ideas about how mentor programs can work.

One notable new program is the HP E-mail Mentor Program at Hewlett-Packard (The Chronicle, April 17).

The program, which was started in 1995 by David Neils, a software engineer at the company, matches students in grades 5 through 12 with employees at Hewlett-Packard who share similar interests. Some 350 students and mentors participated in the first year. That number jumped to 1,508 last year.

Teachers help students devise projects that they work on throughout the school year with their mentor via e-mail, using school computers. Students and adults typically correspond two or three times a week.

But the pairs seldom, if ever, meet face to face, and mentor and student are sometimes on opposite coasts. Such an arrangement worries advocates of traditional mentor programs, like Thomas M. McKenna, national executive director of Big Brothers/Big Sisters of America.

“To me, it’s not mentoring unless there’s a personal contact,” Mr. McKenna says. “I’m not saying that some good things can’t happen on line, but it’s hard to call that mentoring if there’s no face-to-face relationship.”

Bill Wear, a computer-security systems designer at Hewlett-Packard who participates in the program, disagrees. He says that mentor relationships through e-mail are no less legitimate than the traditional kind — and may even provide some added bonuses.

Mr. Wear says he himself was rescued from trouble as a youth by a school guidance counselor who took an interest in him. The counselor, who discovered that the young Mr. Wear was breaking into the school’s computer system, sent him an e-mail message offering to lend an ear.

“It changed the course of my life,” he says.

“Communicating by e-mail removes the fear barrier,” Mr. Wear says. “There’s no physical presence. It’s all in what you say, and if you’re careful in choosing your words, you can have a strong impact.”

The Hewlett-Packard program is also “extremely efficient,” Mr. Neils says. It cost less than $100,000 to operate the whole program last year. He plans to expand the program beyond Hewlett-Packard so that it will eventually reach 100,000 students per year.

Other types of mentor programs that are gaining in popularity are church-run efforts that include religious instruction; group projects, in which one adult volunteer befriends a group of children; and mentor teams, in which two or more adults — possibly a family — form a friendship with one child.

For many small charities, group programs are the only kind they can offer, either because they do not have the resources to run one-on-one programs or because they have trouble recruiting enough mentors for the children who seek them.

The Greater Exodus Baptist Church in Philadelphia first started its group program a decade ago. Hoping to reach as many children as possible, it allowed unlimited enrollment, says Darice Ellis, a congregation member who runs the program. Each Saturday, more than 100 kids piled into the church game room.

“We realized we weren’t meeting their individual needs,” she says. “We were just packing them in.”

Now, the church has a limit of 60 children who spend time with 12 adults — congregation members who have been interviewed and approved by the pastor. In groups of four to ten, usually with two adults present, the children attend cultural and sporting events, learn to use computers, visit the countryside, discuss Christian teachings, or pursue other activities.

“We’d like to do one-on-one mentoring, but that’s going to take a long time because we are always in need of mentors,” says Ms. Ellis.

In the meantime, Greater Exodus has joined a new network of 60 black churches in the city that are working with One to One’s Philadelphia chapter to recruit and train more black role models for kids. The partnership insures that adults are adequately prepared to work with kids from troubled backgrounds.

“A lot of these kids are carrying around adult problems,” Ms. Ellis says. “Being a mentor to them is demanding. We’ve had instances where we’ve had people that we thought were ready but who had to step back.”

Detractors of such group-mentor situations argue that children rarely receive the individual attention that many of them need or crave.

“Some of these kids have such difficulty, and the cards are so stacked against them, they have to have one-on-one attention,” says Saul Cooperman, president of 10,000 Mentors, a charity that hopes to find adults to work with every student in the Newark, N.J., public-school system who wants help.

Currently, 10,000 Mentors is working with three schools in Newark, but it has much more ambitious goals. “We want to be like Big Brothers in quality and McDonald’s in quantity,” says Mr. Cooperman, a former commissioner of education for New Jersey. He plans to take the program to school districts across the country.

Mr. Cooperman acknowledges that he has a difficult road ahead. Last year, 325 adults from area businesses, civic groups, and other organizations were recruited to be mentors.

One reason the numbers are not larger, he says, is that the group makes clear to mentor candidates that they must be serious about the commitment.

“We’re pretty strong in saying that these kids have had their hopes raised and dashed,” he says. “We tell them, ‘If you’re not willing to make a commitment for at least a year, then please don’t join with us.’ ”

Other roadblocks have hampered programs that try to link children with mentors.

Some charities cannot afford to screen out bad applicants.

The National Guard in Oregon used to conduct background checks for groups, but it stopped when it realized that it was not authorized to do the investigations.

Kris Hudson, executive director of the Volunteer Center in Portland, Ore., says some charities cannot afford to do their own checks.

“In some instances, we’ve had groups ask the volunteers to pay to have their own background check done,” she says. “To me, that’s not something a volunteer should have to do.”

But, she adds, groups are reluctant to do away with screening checks for fear that criminals — especially those who have committed crimes against children — will try to enter the programs.

Ms. Hudson says she would like to see Congress take up the issue and designate a national agency to create a data base of volunteers and to perform background checks for all mentor programs.

Despite difficulties, many mentor programs are thriving.

One is the Hospital Youth Mentoring Program, a four-year pilot project in 15 hospitals across the country administered by the Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore and supported by $2.7-million from the Commonwealth Fund.

The test project, which wrapped up earlier this year, paired employees from each of the hospitals with local high-school students and was modeled after an existing mentor program at Johns Hopkins. Thirteen of the hospitals have promised to continue the programs on their own.

Deborah Knight-Kerr, the director, says the program was similar to Big Brothers/Big Sisters, pairing each child with a mentor, and providing regular support and guidance to mentors. The big difference, she says, is that the hospital program made a special effort to get the students to focus on careers.

“We found we needed that element to keep the kids engaged,” Ms. Knight-Kerr says. “Most high-school kids don’t want to be seen in public with an adult. We had to come up with something that was going to keep their interest.”

Of the 1,139 students who enrolled in the program, more than 830 stayed through the end.

“Having that person who takes an interest in their lives, helping direct them toward a future, that’s where the power of mentoring comes from,” Ms. Knight-Kerr says. “For those kids who don’t have that support system at home, this is vital.”