News Alert: Mentoring as part of the solution for Chicago’s violence?

This recent article in the Chicago Tribute highlights insights shared by NMRC Research Board Chair Dr. David DuBois, who shares his personal story of being a mentor in Chicago, and discusses the impact mentoring can have on both the protégé and mentor in the mentoring relationship.

“You hear from mentors that it helps them reconnect with the simple pleasures of growing up,” he says, “being outside of themselves. There’s a lot of benefits there, but they’ve been less well-documented.”

The article also makes connections about the ways in which mentoring can foster understanding between mentors’ and mentees’ communities, particularly in cities like Chicago that are divided by race and class. From a mentor quoted in the article: “I didn’t understand the good as much as I didn’t understand the bad. I think that’s really important.” The article describes mentoring as a way of “opening up the borders” in Chicago to share responsibility for solving major problems, like violence.

To achieve this type of impact, DuBois indicates that mentors must possess cultural humility, and it falls on mentoring programs to train mentors that “they don’t necessarily know best, that they are visitors in the child’s world.”

Says Margie Morris, Executive Director of the Illinois Mentoring Partnership, which organizes and sets standards for 200 or so programs: “It’s about meeting kids where they are, giving them some tools to navigate. It’s allowing them to find their own way, but with some guidance. It’s more like ‘I’m on this journey with you.'”

As mentoring practitioners, how can we train mentors to understand and embody cultural humility? What does it take to manage mentoring programs that build bridges between communities and foster collective problem-solving?