Mentoring Award

Just wanted to share with you some photos and some good news with you!

As you may know, I've been mentoring Aron since April 2006 through a local non-profit mentoring agency, Committed Partners for Youth. My CPY coordinator Jenny nominated me for a mentoring award, which I won (along with one other mentor from ND)!! The Outstanding Mentor of the Year award was presented by the Family & Youth Services Bureau, within the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services. Aron, his mother Alfa, and I were flown to Washington DC on Wed to receive the award as part of the Mentoring Children of Prisoners conference.

I posted some photos here. More at: http://www.flickr.com/gp/21422270@N02/8b2966

If you'd like a little more background, see below.

MENTORING:
Committed Partners for Youth (www.committedpartners.org) is a local non-profit mentoring agency (it's not Big Brother, Big Sister); they are an independent agency & serve only the Eugene-Springfield area. My mentee is Aron; he's now 12 & is 5th grader who lives in Springfield. He is the third kid of six (has 2 brothers and 3 sisters, the youngest has Downs) and they are first generation Americans whose mother moved here from Mexico; all the children are bilingual but their mother Alfa only speaks Spanish. Aron and his two brother and one of his sisters are all in one of the mentoring programs at CPY for children of incarcerated partners (their father was in prison for domestic abuse). Though the program is only one year, I've continued to maintain a relationship with Aron and we've done all kinds of activities together: movies, UO basketball games, the fair, snowshoeing, rock climbing, sailing, studying at the library, magician show, cookie decorating, a cooking class...

Aron is a very quiet kid, pretty well behaved, does okay in school though he still needs to take ELL classes, loves sports and video games, and (in my opinion and what I've observed) is overshadowed by his siblings who are all much louder than he is. He is pretty apprehensive to try new things, doesn't talk much, hardly ever smiles, and took a LONG time to open up with me. Lately though our relationship has been working well.

Although it looks like we just play, research has shown that mentoring can help improve kids self-esteem, encourage them to do better in school, decrease their drug & alcohol use, improve their relationships, and decrease their risk of becoming incarcerated themselves U.S. Senate report indicated that children of prisoners, without appropriate role models, are 6 times more likely to be incarcerated themselves than their peers who do not have an incarcerated parent).

Bush's administration has created an initiative for mentoring children of prisoners. As part of that initiative, there is a Mentoring Children of Prisoners conference and a mentor award program. In the spring, my mentoring coordinator Jenny nominated me (and at least one other mentor from our program) for a mentoring award. To our surprise, I won! The award was presented by the Family & Youth Services Bureau, within the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services (www.acf.hhs.gov/programs/fysb/). I was one of two mentors selected for the Outstanding Mentor of the Year award; there were also four honorable mentions. The other mentor and I, and our mentees and their caregiver, were all flown to Washington DC on Wed to receive the award as part of the Mentoring Children of Prisoners conference. We stayed Wed-Friday and had a whirlwind trip!

THE TRIP: On Wednesday, Aron, Alfa and I left first thing in the AM to fly all day to DC. The entire trip was quite challenging because my Spanish is very poor and Alfa doesn't speak any English so we really struggled to communicate but it worked out with a lot of hand motioning and a lot of guessing on her part (since I struggle to say things correctly in Spanish). Everything was paid for us.

The award ceremony was on Thursday morning. I followed the guy from North Dakota, and when my name was called, I got up on stage in front of this conference of 500 from mentoring agencies around the U.S. and got to say a little about my relationship with Aron. Thankfully I took as much time as I wanted to say thanks, etc, because the rest of the ceremony featured this boxer, Bernand Hopkins (the undisputed middleweight champion of the world), who talked about his victories and weakly tried to relate this to mentoring... let's just say it was a bit of a stretch and mainly was just a chance for this guy to talk about how great he thinks he is and how much he believes he deserves all the fame and money he has. I declined to have my photo op with him. If I can ever get a copy of the video from the ceremony, I'll send around the link.

Then Alfa, Aron, and I joined the other mentor, mentee, and caregiver for a tour of DC. Luckily we had a translator for Alfa! We visited the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum and our senators' offices (though they were actually all out on vacation so it seemed a little pointless), took a tour of the Capitol building (there's an underground tunnel between the senators' office buildings and the Capitol that we got to go through), dined at the Hard Rock Cafe, and took a tour of the West Wing of the White House. Unfortunately we couldn't take any pictures inside the West Wing, but I'll just say that it was built by T. Roosevelt and is much smaller, tighter, and shorter than I expected. The Oval Office is actually not all that big. Bush was having a Christmas party in the White House (it was after hours) so we didn't get to see that (what?! No cookies and eggnog for us?!? How rude!).

On Friday, Aron, Alfa, one of CPY's coordinators who was there for the conference (Jay), and I went to the National Zoo because Aron is doing a book report on pandas. So we got to see the pandas rough-housing, cheetahs, elephants, hippos, apes, etc. Then flew home. It was slam-packed the entire trip (I slept most of the day today to recover)! It was totally exhausting (for me at least), but a good experience for all of us. I feel very thankful to have been able to take Aron & Alfa to DC and expose them to all these new experiences (I just visited DC in August).

A WORD FROM MY "SPEECH" TO END ON:
As I learned from my greatest mentor, my mother, we should strive to leave things better than how we found them.