Celebrating our Youth Advisory Group Members!

In April 2023, we convened our Youth Advisory Group to inform our new State of Relationships According to Youth Report Project. We were excited and humbled to welcome Eli Tilema, Tymajah Maxwell, Zachary Lee, Brian Herder, and Raheen Bridges to talk with us about their opinions and experiences with adults and how they show up for young people.

MENTOR Independence Region (MIR) is conducting a State of Relationships According to Youth Project to hear what young people think about mentoring. MIR sees mentoring as adult-youth relationships grounded in love and caring with a common purpose and eye to the future. We want to know what youth have, want, and need from their relationships with adults in order to thrive. MIR sees young people as experts who know best about their lives and what they want from mentoring relationships, and so we need to talk directly with youth to understand the impact of positive mentoring relationships on young people’s lives. The goal of this project is to amplify youth voice and perspective to improve the field of mentoring and ultimately address social justice issues in our local community of Philadelphia.

We learned so much from Raheen, Tymajah, Zachary, Eli and Brian. They bring interesting perspectives as young adults who are in the early stages of their careers and are being mentored, and as mentors to many school students themselves. They challenged our ideas about “mentoring”, about family, about youth-centricity and about racial equity.

We are using a type of research called Youth Participatory Action Research, where the Youth Advisory Group Members are collaborating with us on the things we are measuring, the things we are asking, and how to ask it. We will keep them informed of our progress in talking with young people, and they’ll help us analyze the data and determine what it means at the completion of our focus groups.

We are excited to keep you informed of our progress and learnings! Stay tuned and please reach out if you’d like to learn more or get your group of young people involved in the project!

Special thanks to Shana Savage at the Urban Technology Project for connecting us to these talented young people and for being a great partner. Thank you to Dr. Kristen Goessling, who is advising us on Youth Participatory Action Research methods.  Thank you to Safiyyah Barrett and Lenisha Maxwell for helping to pilot our Focus Group.  And thank you to MENTOR National for funding this project!