Harriett’s Daughters Refine Mentoring Program Vision and Revise Grief Workshop for Group Mentoring Model with Technical Assistance from MENTOR Colorado
Harriett’s Daughters will provide a hybrid with group and one-to-one mentoring for girls who have lost their mother to cancer or whose mother is dying from cancer. The goal of the organization is to provide family support services, mentoring programs, scholarships, and research-based programs for school-aged girls in the Greater Atlanta area. The team at Harriett’s Daughters understands that having a solid support system through the loss of a mother is an integral part of the healing process and that mentors alongside family and friends add an additional layer of support. Through their mentoring program, staff match young girls who have already lost or losing their mothers to cancer with a woman who has lost her mother or someone who was like a mother to cancer.
Founder and CEO Neiasha Russell requested no-cost technical assistance (TA) to align her vision with the Elements of Effective Practice for Mentoring. Cheryl Clark of MENTOR Colorado fulfilled her TA request. The TA aided in flushing out programmatic ideas and organizing the program’s design. As Neiasha describes, it helped “build upon my vision and expand my thinking over the course of several weeks, which resulted in a merging of ideas – designing an 8-week grief workshop that utilizes the group-mentoring model. She (Cheryl) helped me determine a potential timeline, we ironed out several details, and we reviewed the grief workshop curriculum I planned to modify and use.”
Collaborating remotely through zoom and phone calls, Cheryl provided Neiasha with foundational resources/templates tailored to her program’s needs. Excited by Neiasha’s passion and clear vision for her program, Cheryl focused “on developing the basis for what effective mentoring programs need while honoring the uniqueness of what Neiasha’s program brings.” While reflecting on the consultation with Neiasha, Cheryl expressed the importance of Harriett’s Daughters type of programming, stating
“I was also impressed by the uniqueness and need for this program. Grief is something we do not deal with enough in the mentoring community, and at some point, we will all lose a loved one. Helping young people with those skills early on helps make more well-rounded adults. Especially those who have experienced trauma or lost someone to a disease.”
Cheryl and Neiasha worked well together and are proud of what they developed for the program. Through technical assistance, Neiasha became more confident in rolling out the hybrid group mentoring workshop and one-to-one mentoring program. Her goal is to launch the latter sometime during the winter of 2023.
For updates and announcements regarding the program’s rollout and group mentoring grief workshop, please visit http://www.harriettsdaughters.org/, subscribe to their monthly newsletters, and follow them on all their social media platforms @harriettsdaugh1. For those who would like to become a mentor or refer a young lady to their program, please email Neiasha Russell at nrussell@harriettsdaughters.org or call 404-850-6435.
MENTOR partners with the U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP) to deliver the National Mentoring Resource Center (NMRC) to the mentoring field. In addition to convening a Research Board which develops evidence-based reviews about mentoring topics, and offering a comprehensive mentoring resource center website, the NMRC provides mentoring programs nationwide with the opportunity to request and receive no-cost technical assistance to help them more deeply incorporate evidence-based practices into their programming. Once a mentoring program requests technical assistance, their request is assigned to a local or regional technical assistance provider within MENTOR’s network of state and local affiliates and TA providers. New and emerging mentoring programs may benefit from technical assistance to help them design and implement programs that meet quality standards as outlined in the Elements of Effective Practice for Mentoring ™, while existing or established programs may utilize TA to improve operations, assess impact, or adapt their program to changing or emerging community needs.
Learn more about Harriett’s Daughters, and MENTOR Colorado. Submit a request for no-cost technical assistance for your youth mentoring program here.