Platform

I will always remember the day that I felt what it was like to be called a loser. I was taking out the trash before school one morning and when the garage door opened, there it was.  Written in brightly colored chalk was the word “loser” all over my driveway. The most tragic part of all was that the words were not intended for me, they were meant for my little brother who was a seventh grader at the time. This moment made bullying real for me because it had extended beyond issues that he was dealing with at school and it brought the pain of the situation into my family. We all felt the intense pain of how words can pierce the heart that day.

At the time of this incident I was already a strong advocate for mentoring. Mentoring encourages healthy relationships by teaching emotional and social intelligence. Emotional intelligence is how we interpret and respond to the messages being sent to us and social intelligence is how we behave in social settings. Both of these skills are crucial to an individual’s success and oftentimes they are not taught in the home or at school. Mentors play a critical role in the life of a child because they teach children to maintain healthy relationships, to be socially perceptive, and to help children have higher levels of confidence.

But it was not until I was an educator standing in front of my own classroom at the University of Arkansas that I realized the missing link in the mentoring relationship: COMMUNICATION.  If we are not teaching our youth how to communicate, then every other skill that we focus on developing in that person will fall short of the desired goal.  It was with this realization that I set out to build a stronger mentoring program – one that concentrates on building crucial communication skills to help our students reach their full potential and to be able to communicate their passions, whatever those may be.

So far, I have served more than 2,050 hours as a mentor. What I have learned is that mentoring works because we are all in a position of mentorship, whether spending an afternoon with your child and their friends, going for a walk in the park together, or joining a designated mentoring program; the range of our influence is limitless. To date, 3 million at risk kids in America have benefitted from having a healthy mentoring relationship. But mentorship alone is not enough to combat the aggressive trend of bullying. We must communicate to succeed in life and I believe that mentors need to be empowered to Communicate for Change by giving them the resources to not only guide but also train our youth to use the power of their own voice to promote change in every day social situations.  By doing this, we have a chance to truly change the way kids communicate with themselves, their peers, their teachers, and their parents. This is the necessary next step in making our youth more triumphant citizens.