Become A Mentor
What does being a mentor involve?
Mentors spend a minimum of four hours a month with their protégés. Many spend more time than that, but that is at their own discretion. Mentor-protégé contact may happen during school lunch visits, phone calls, or personal meetings for breakfast together, after school snacks, and discussions. Many pairs also take occasional outings or trips, which are encouraged.
Other Formal Program Activities
Seminars are held throughout the year to offer students information on financial aid for higher education, strategies for staying off drugs, and self-esteem building. As a result, the students begin to realize that their own attitudes are the determining factor in their own success.
Community Service projects such as feeding the homeless are a big part of the Mentor’s Project. Through involvement in such service work, the students gain an appreciation of the privilege of giving back to others and learn to take pride in and responsibility for their own community.
The Mentor’s Project of Bibb County, Inc. offers students an opportunity to dream big and understand exactly how their dreams can be realized. This happens because the program has the student proteges work with their mentors to chart a course for success by journaling in workbooks that specifically guide them to focus on career goals and objectives and develop a plan for working with their mentor and others to achieve them.
Program Purpose and Results
The current Mentor’s Project of Bibb County, Inc. program purpose states that the program provides disadvantaged students motivation through the encouragement of an adult mentor role model who helps students learn to be a success and to reach their potential. People sometimes ask program leaders the extent to which the Bibb County Mentors Project actually achieves its purpose. The results are outstanding and speak for themselves! Seniors in the class of 2016 who were enrolled in the Mentor’s Project had an astonishing 100% graduation rate. No other local program can boast these kinds of results.
First, mentoring provides rewarding opportunities for the adults to benefit from as they become a positive influence in a student’s life. There is no greater reward in life than making a difference in the life of a child/young adult.
Next, through their match with a middle or high school student in Bibb County, mentors’ one-to-one relationships provide a strong motivating force that builds benefits for students, too. The program has a proven positive impact on the students’ self-esteem and academic performance. Ninety percent of the at-risk students enrolled in our program have been saved from dropping out of school or from receiving in-school suspension or assignment to one of the alternative schools.
In the process of empowering students for a better future, the Mentor’s Project of Bibb County, Inc. provides a support system to ensure that more students consider post high school educational or training options, positively affect the students’ behaviors and attitudes, enhance the students’ self-confidence, improve the ability to resist negative peer pressure including drinking, drugs, and pregnancy.
If you would like to make a difference in a child’s life, please consider becoming a mentor in a program like the Bibb County Student Mentoring Program. Contact June O’Neal, director, at 478-765-8624 if you are interested.