Better Together: LA Team Mentoring
How LA Team Mentoring is transforming the lives of young people by bringing teamwork off the field
Diversity. Reach. Community. These three things are keys to the success of LA Team Mentoring—an innovative approach to youth mentoring aimed at helping change the lives of roughly 1,300 kids a year, in 11 middle schools across the Los Angeles area.
And, it’s working.
Director of Programs William Figueroa has been with LA Team Mentoring since 2007. “Group mentoring as an idea was evolving about nine years ago, and it really piqued my curiosity, because in the mentoring world, it’s so difficult to find volunteers,” he says.
“There are tons of kids, of course, who are in need of mentoring, and/or can benefit from having a positive role model in their lives—particularly kids who come from at-risk communities. But there aren’t enough adults to go around.”
Team or group mentoring, as Figueroa explains, alleviates this problem. Instead of traditional one-on-one mentoring or tutoring, the team mentoring approach takes its inspiration from the sports world: typically, three adults will work with a group of kids, in a structured, after-school environment.
“You’re really leveraging a small pool of volunteers, but yet maximizing your reach with youth.”
“The group mentoring concept was something I was starting to introduce at my old agency, but there wasn’t a lot of information out there,” Figueroa says. He says that he learned more about it through his connection to Los Angeles’ coalition of mentoring programs—the more he learned, the more it resonated with him.
“You’re really leveraging a small pool of volunteers, but yet maximizing your reach with youth,” says Figueroa.
However, that doesn’t mean that all the challenges of recruiting volunteers are solved. That’s where college and corporate relationships come in.
“Through corporate adoption relationships, as well as college relationships — we have corporations and colleges like UCLA and Toyota that adopt one or two schools — and the fact that we recruit ten teachers from each school, we’ve been able to get close to fulfilling our model [of three adults mentoring 12 students],” outlines Figueroa. “We are not 100% there yet, but we’re working hard to find more corporations and colleges to adopt our schools.”
What are the advantages of the team model for the kids? “One of the things that I’ve learned since coming here, and that I think is really a beautiful thing, is that the kids get to benefit from various perspectives, instead of just one,” Figueroa says.
“In the traditional one-to-one model, you’re really hanging everything on that one adult. In our model, you’ve got a teacher who is there and who is the constant—the teacher forms the connection to school and can help with school-related programs, like counseling or tutoring.
“Then, you have a college mentor. And many times—I’d say about 99% of the time—they are students who want to give back, who might have come from similar circumstances. They’re there to tell the kids ‘hey, you can do it—I’ve lived through the same situation, but I’m in college. You can go to college, too.’”
Finally, the third perspective offers insight into the workplace.
“The business professional, the person already in a career, can really get the kids to think outside of their own community—to think of jobs that maybe they’ve never considered or even been aware of in the past.”
“The teachers who sign up are really teachers who want to extend themselves. That in itself speaks volumes.”
Having worked for both traditional and team mentoring programs, the choice is clear for Figueroa. “For all those reasons, I’ve found that this model is really the most enriching model that a kid, an at-risk kid, can get.”
Like any after-school program, LA Team Mentoring has to be selective. The application and screening process for new college and professional mentor volunteers is extensive, and includes online and in-person training with LA Team Mentoring staff. It’s a lot to take on, and often, the process itself helps to produce the most committed mentors.
That’s true of the teachers as well.
“The teachers who sign up are really teachers who want to extend themselves. That in itself speaks volumes. If they’re raising their hands after working for eight hours, in a classroom with middle-school kids all day long—if they’re willing to stay after school, then they’re usually the right fit for the program.”
While sports offer a natural structure, with a season of training and competition, the curriculum is not so immediately obvious when talking about team mentoring.
“When you’re working with at-risk, middle-school kids, they need to have that structure, that routine,” Figueroa says. “It’s necessary for cooperative behavior, as well as team morale, and it’s another difference between our program and more traditional mentoring programs. So, the curriculum is structured, and it’s structured in a very careful way—after about the first month or so of the program, the kids start to get it. They’re telling the adults, right, we’re supposed to be doing this now, or working on that now, etc.
“We have three years of curriculum—we’re only working with the kids while they’re in sixth, seventh, and eighth grade.” The first two years are interchangeable—the program swaps back and forth each year so that the kids get a different experience each time, but the structure remains the same.
This changes, however, for year three, when kids are getting ready for high school.
“Year three is exclusively for our eighth graders, and it’s definitely more conversational and more project-based,” says Figueroa. “That’s because, by that time, they’re a little more mature. They want to talk more. There’s a lot more discussion, reflection, and introspection. There’s more thinking about high school and the future.”
“When they find that there’s a caring adult, who’s there and who wants to listen to them and spend time with them, and who isn’t being paid to be there, they start to love the program.”
From the day-to-day perspective, meetings always start with the group sitting in a circle, and a check-in with each of the students. There’s a question of the day, and usually that question relates to the main objective of the afternoon’s activity.
After the activity, students will reflect together in a circle, with questions—the kids will then write about what they’ve learned, and LATM asks that they take home their day’s lesson and have it signed by their parents. “We want the parents to be learning alongside their kids, and helping to reinforce what their son or daughter is learning in our program.”
Connection to home is something that Figueroa says resonates with the kids—that feeling of extended family helps foster community and dedication to one another.
“When they find that there’s a caring adult, who’s there and who wants to listen to them and spend time with them, and who isn’t being paid to be there, they start to love the program.”
That helps explain the program’s remarkable 70% retention rate.
“Often, these kids are just hungry for someone to talk to—a community to share things with,” Figueroa says. “We’re working with adolescents. That’s a difficult time in our lives. We’re moving from the safety of one teacher and group of kids in an elementary school, to an environment where we’re switching classrooms, walking the halls, interacting with lots of different kids. Puberty is kicking in, they’re in a different place physically and emotionally. Some of them may be being bullied.
“All those things can make a kid feel afraid. In a program like ours, because it’s team-based, the kids start to come out of their shells. They start to realize who they are, and grow into themselves. The stories go on and on,” Figueroa says.
“My goal at the end of the day, give our kids the hope and confidence they need to make the right choices in life — starting now, at the most critical time of their development. This way, they are able to live a life full of infinite possibilities and opportunities.” ^DFG
Story by Bryan Kitch, for UpMetrics Data for Good.
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