Tag: Mentoring

From Startup to Success

Posted on by robbie

If you could get anyone on the phone to help with the biggest issue you’re facing in your work, who would you call? That’s the question posed to participants of the GLG Social Impact Fellowship, week after week, for two years. The fellowship, sponsored by the membership-based learning platform GLG, aims to help top social entrepreneurs rise to the challenges, both strategic and operational, facing their companies as they scale their reach. Unlike a cash award, the unique program, which began in 2014, gives mission-driven leaders two years of free access to GLG’s vast network of experts and events; fellows utilize GLG just as traditional GLG clients do. The process is a huge benefit to the organizations that determine which critical questions they need answered.
Entrepreneurs who’ve been through the fellowship stress how important it is to be ready to jump on this massive opportunity. They talk about how the fellowship not only strengthens their own leadership skills but those of their teams as well. (Any employee of an organization whose leader is chosen as a fellow can tap GLG’s network of experts.) The results of all that learning can be truly transformational.
Here, 10 former and current fellows reflect on the impact the fellowship has had on propelling their organizations forward.

DONNEL BAIRD, 2015 FELLOW

Baird is the founder and CEO of Bloc Power, focusing on community development and energy efficiency.

“Being a CEO or founder can be quite lonely in terms of the difficulty of the decisions you have to make. So for me, the community of founders who won the GLG fellowship was really critical.
“For example, we were doing an interactive workshop setting five-year goals, and I had these audacious goals. And I got great feedback on the goals — and then the other CEOs were like, ‘Wait a second, Donnel, you don’t have a personal assistant.’ I grew up working-class, and I think that’s weird. They said, ‘You’re actually failing your organization.’ If it takes you two weeks to do something that should take an hour because you’re so backlogged, that sets your whole organization back.”

MINHAJ CHOWDHURY, 2016 FELLOW

Chowdhury is the co-founder and CEO of Drinkwell, focusing on water and sanitation.

“[Key lessons include:] 1) Reach out to experts who may seem unreachable. Some may donate their time due to your social mission, so it doesn’t hurt to ask. 2) Building a board of advisors is critical to succeeding as a company, as knowledge and experience is at times much more valuable than capital alone. 3) There are a lot of lessons learned from analog industries that initially may not seem related to your industry, but have applications. In fact, such applications can create unique advantages that others in your sector have not thought of.
“[A highlight of the fellowship was] being able to connect with experts who have previously conducted business with Dhaka WASA, a new customer in the urban segment. The experts saved us significant time and money, and helped us negotiate a good operating model with sound economics from the get-go. We were confident going into negotiations with the utility in a way that we could have never done had it not been for GLG.”

KRISTA DONALDSON, 2016 FELLOW

Donaldson is the CEO of D-Rev, focusing on healthcare technologies.

“We are super-users of GLG. On any given week we have probably three or four calls, minimum. To be able to talk to one of the three world experts in something on the phone for half an hour is amazing. A lot of people think it’s just coaching for the CEO, but our whole team uses them.
“At a 500-foot level one of the things I’ve learned is be bold in asking to talk to experts. It’s made us bolder as an organization. And sometimes they ask questions that make you realize that you haven’t really thought through the question you think you’re asking. When someone asks, ‘Why are you doing that?’ it just makes you go a level deeper than you might otherwise in the course of a busy day.”

GLG startup 2
Fellows have included (from left) Barbara Bush, Minhaj Chowdhury, Eric Liu, Krista Donaldson, Misan Rewane and Jake Wood.

MATILDA HO, 2017 FELLOW

Ho is the founder and CEO of Yimishiji, focusing on food and agriculture.

“Right from the get-go, Yimishiji has sought to achieve the highest level of sourcing standards and transparency, that no other e-commerce platform in China has done. This means there is tremendous learning we have had to do as a team, from the manager level to senior executive.
“So many teams have benefited from the program in such different ways. For example, when we were looking to set up objectives and key results for the engineering team, it was hugely valuable for our CTO to be able to talk with other CTOs with this experience from larger companies. And when we were assessing the possibility of setting up physical stores, we received great lessons on how we might approach planning and decision making. All of this access is very powerful.”

JUKAY HSU, 2017 FELLOW

Hsu is the founder and CEO of C4Q, focusing on tech vocational training.

“C4Q is at a critical stage of growth. We began as a small community startup, and we saw the opportunity to use our model to not just transform the lives of people with the most need and potential in New York City, but also across the country. So we were in need of expertise to help us achieve that large scale and sustain it.
“When we applied, our organization was just beginning an extensive rebrand. Working with GLG, we were able to receive best practices from industry leaders, and conduct research and surveys to get feedback on our direction and help inform decision-making.”

Learn more about the GLG Social Impact Fellowship,
including information on applying.

JOSH MCALISTER, 2017 FELLOW

McAlister is the founder and CEO of Frontline, focusing on child welfare and social work.

“The group itself of fellows is tremendously diverse. In terms of bits of the planet that people come from, it’s really different. The social issues we’re working to address are really varied. The models of interventions are different. And yet there are really common challenges across the different organizations.
“A highlight is having that forced space with a group of really impressive peers and facilitators to think about the big issues you don’t normally spend much time thinking about. The example I used in Austin last year was, How do we make sure that our alumni group is a real movement for change? That is not an everyday question for us. Having that space and time with a group of people who can challenge and help you in your thinking is really great.”

ANUSHKA RATNAYAKE, 2017 FELLOW

Ratnayake is the founder and CEO of myAGRO, focusing on rural agribusiness financing.

“There’s this new worm that destroys maize fields in a matter of minutes. The pest wasn’t going to wait for us to develop a solution. Our agriculture team was able to tap into the GLG learning network and talk to companies in India that are used to spraying smallholder farms. We were able to find a sprayer that uses 10 times less water. We solved a problem that we didn’t even know was a problem before rolling it out to farmers.
“I’ve worked in a number of nonprofits. It’s easy to be insular. You have a problem and you really know the clients, it’s easy to think that the resources you have in front of you are the only resources. There’s a lot of learning we can get from looking at other organizations who might be doing different things but have asked very similar questions of themselves.”

REBECCA VAN BERGEN, 2015 FELLOW

Van Bergen is the founder and executive director of Nest, focusing on global artisan empowerment.

“The trend toward funding social entrepreneurs is exciting but can be limiting, because I alone could never make our work happen. This fellowship allowed my team to access it — because we had access to the GLG network, we really were deliberate. We had a calendar invite for an hour weekly for people to spend time thinking about what they were working on that GLG could help with. That was a valuable exercise.
“It was a non-monetary award, but the value you get out of two years’ worth of these incredible people we would never have been able to afford as consultants is incalculable. It allowed us to invest in things that were really instrumental, but would have been really hard for us to justify [spending money on] or to raise additional funds for.”

KIAH WILLIAMS, 2017 FELLOW

Williams is the co-founder of SIRUM, focusing on healthcare access.

“As SIRUM explores expansion, GLG is able to help us understand at a state and local level what are areas that might be more in need of our work. What we’re getting out of it is the ability to go very high level and understand national trends, but also go very local and be able to ask a nursing home in Missouri how they handle their unused medicine.
“Instead of taking all of the zigzags that it often takes to find an expert who can answer these questions, it is a straight shot — you to GLG to expert. It’s not only helping you make these decisions, but it also saves a lot of time. Time is money, especially in social enterprises and startups.”

JAKE WOOD, 2016 FELLOW

Wood is the co-founder and CEO of Team Rubicon, focusing on veterans’ empowerment and disaster relief.

“The people I met through the program were just fantastic. When I travel across the country I’m always looking them up to grab beers with them and catch up. One of the things I remember us talking about was the unspoken rules that we imbue in our organization. Usually you have these explicit values and rules for how people should be conducting themselves, but there are always these unwritten rules that develop, and some of them are good and some of them are actually fairly negative. It’s useful to try to pull out what some of those unspoken rules are.
“[Thanks to the fellowship,] we’re just smarter. We have the ability to ask really hard questions and get really thorough and thoughtful answers. We’re a faster, more efficient organization.”

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GLG Social Impact is an initiative of GLG to advance learning and decision-making among distinguished nonprofit and social enterprise leaders. The GLG Social Impact Fellowship provides learning resources to a select group of nonprofits and social enterprises, at no cost. Read more about the program here.

In College, Former Foster Kids Pay It Forward

Posted on by robbie

Bria Davis didn’t have the easiest time growing up. Her mother suffered from schizophrenia and her father wasn’t around. As a result, she was placed into the foster-care system, which meant changing schools every year.
“Coming out of high school, I never was in a stable place,” Davis says.
Davis’ freshman year at Miami Dade College in Florida was challenging, and she eventually sought help. Now a well-acclimated sophomore, Davis decided she was in a unique position to give back. So she joined the Changemaker Corps, a peer-to-peer mentoring program by and for students who are aging out of foster care. The service year program launched at Miami Dade in 2015 with support from Service Year Alliance and the nonprofit Educate Tomorrow.
The idea behind Changemaker Corps is to encourage former foster-care students who have gotten help navigating college life to pass on that wisdom to struggling students from similar backgrounds. After all, no one is more qualified to understand the difficulties facing a student emerging from the foster system than a young person who has already lived through them.
“The service year model is a way for college students to serve, actually mentoring and helping others succeed,” says Brett McNaught, CEO of Educate Tomorrow.
The commitment to helping this student population succeed extends to Miami Dade College’s upper leadership.
“More and more universities are understanding the importance of giving their students the opportunity to get involved in this work,” says Eduardo Padron, president of Miami Dade College. “A service year should be part of every institution, where students have opportunities to help their school, their communities, and our nation.”

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NationSwell asks you to join our partnership with Service Year Alliance. Watch the video above and ask Congress to support federal funding for national service. Together, we can lead a national movement to give young Americans the opportunity to help bridge the divides in our country.

When Entrepreneurship Is the Only Option

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It was a childhood lie that sparked the entrepreneurial fire in Geraud Staton and set him on a path that would eventually transform his community.
When he was 14, Staton’s older cousin bragged about how he’d been creating comic books and selling them at school for a dollar. “I thought, ‘He’s making money. I can do the same,’” recalls Staton, who now mentors other aspiring entrepreneurs in Durham, N.C. There was just one problem, though. “He told me later that he was absolutely lying — he was just trying to impress his little cousin,” Staton says. But the idea had been planted in Staton’s mind, and by the time he finished freshman year he had his first taste of entrepreneurial success: buying candy in bulk and reselling it to his classmates for a profit.
People who succeed in launching businesses typically have unfettered access to advice and support from a parent, a grandparent or an uncle who was an entrepreneur themselves, he says. “But there are people in communities, including mine, who did not have that. I wanted to be that uncle,” says Staton, whose mission to help what he calls “entrepreneurs of necessity” led him to found the Helius Foundation, a nonprofit that provides free coaching and mentoring to under-resourced small business owners in Durham who have struggled to find living-wage jobs.
“It’s incredibly hard to be an entrepreneur,” says Staton, who attended the Kauffman Foundation’s inaugural ESHIP Summit in June, where NationSwell caught up with him. “But it’s even harder for this particular group of people to find dignified jobs.”

Paying It Forward

Staton credits the early support he got from adults like his teachers and principal with having an outsize impact on his future. “I assumed at the time that everyone had the same encouragement and opportunity,” Staton says of his younger self. As he matured, however, he realized that for many of his peers — Staton grew up in a predominantly lower-middle-class African-American neighborhood in Durham — that simply wasn’t true.
Many of the minorities and women Staton works with have marketable skills but lack business sense. “These are people who can’t afford to fail, starting businesses that are often the first to fail,” he says. To remedy that, the Helius Foundation provides them with free coaching and mentoring services, helps them develop a strategic plan, and teaches them marketing basics.
Though Helius has a short history, having launched in 2015, it’s already given several program participants a much-needed leg up. One mentee, Connell Green, had worked in restaurants until an I-beam fell on him, temporarily paralyzing him. After the accident, he lost his family and his home. “He used baking as a way to heal and focus his attention, and help get some of his mobility back,” Staton says. Now he’s the owner of a successful bakery.
Another mentee is Ayubi Easente, who at just 14 years old is running a thriving business refurbishing high-end sneakers. “He doesn’t know if this is what he wants to do for a living,” Staton says, but Easente is gaining skills that will serve him throughout his life no matter what he eventually pursues.

From Obstacles to Opportunity

The Helius Foundation is based in Durham’s Hayti district, an area that used to be home to a flourishing African-American community with many black-owned businesses; it was once known as the “Black Wall Street.”
But thanks in part to the construction of an interstate that divided Hayti in the early 1960s, the community suffered a serious decline. Today, 46 percent of African-Americans live at or below the poverty line, Staton says, and fewer than 18 percent of local businesses are black-owned. “Those numbers are just horrifying,” he says, adding that changing them “would be huge for our city.”
But building a local ecosystem that supports entrepreneurship is a challenge. When you ask residents what the community needs, Staton says, “jobs” is always the answer. But he doesn’t believe that a large corporation relocating to the area is the best solution to the region’s challenges. “If we can get 1,000 people to start a small business and hire one or two people, we get the same number of jobs, but more sustainability,” he points out. “That money gets to stay inside our community.”
A large part of what Staton does is simply encourage people to try entrepreneurship. “I’ve got people who come in and still believe that they can’t make it,” he says. “I’m having to do a lot more psychology than I thought I would.” In a sense, he’s passing on the gift his cousin gave him: “Someone told me I could do it, and I went out and did it,” he says. “We have a lot of entrepreneurs who just don’t know they can do it, so my job is to show them they can.”

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This content was produced in partnership with the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, which works in entrepreneurship and education to create opportunities and connect people to the tools they need to achieve success, change their futures and give back to their communities. In June 2017, the foundation hosted its inaugural ESHIP Summit, convening 435 leaders fighting to help break down barriers for entrepreneurs across the country.

The Low-Risk Way to Help At-Risk Kids

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Perhaps the biggest danger for at-risk youth is the loss of social ties. Stranded by an absent family or an uncaring community, there’s usually no stopgap to prevent a young person from dropping out of school, turning to drugs or uncorking their anger with violence — unless a coach, pastor or neighbor steps in. In other words, these children need a mentor.

Too often, the kids most in need of reassurance and guidance aren’t connected with a mentor. Nearly one-third of America’s youth grow up without a trusted adult relationship outside their home. Of those, more than half — 9 million American kids, about the same size as all of New York City — are considered at-risk.

As the founder and CEO of MentorMe, a tech platform for youth and small business development, Brit Fitzpatrick is out to change that. “I can’t help but wonder what would happen if we shifted the way we view mentoring relationships from something formed by happenstance or as a product of privilege, to something that can be used as a tool to actually strengthen our communities,” she says. “What would happen if we shifted the focus of cities from attracting outside talent to actually investing in the young talent that’s already there? What if, along with great neighborhoods and great schools, every child was given a great mentor?”

The for-profit MentorMe, founded in 2014 in Memphis, Tenn., uses technology to better serve disconnected youth. Their cloud-based platform helps nonprofit organizations match their volunteers to the right child, manage the pair’s activities and then measure the impact of the relationship. As clients like Points of Light, the Knoxville Chamber of Commerce and the State of New York can vouch, MentorMe’s automated software program beats tracking each mentor and mentee on an Excel spreadsheet or, worse, with pen and paper. At Memphis Grizzlies Foundation, senior manager Desiree’ Robertson says the biggest boon has been the online application, particularly useful during the holidays when she might receive five or six requests a day. Fitzpatrick estimates that, for most clients, administrative time is cut by a quarter with the platform.

“The way mentoring programs are traditionally run is not scalable, as they rely on paperwork, spreadsheets and half-baked solutions,” Fitzpatrick says. “Unfortunately, most people underestimate the time needed to run mentoring programs successfully, and while they roll out to great fanfare, most fizzle out before gaining significant traction.”

Why is a streamlined process so important? Matching a kid with the wrong mentor can actually do significant damage. A mentoring relationship that lasts for less than six months actually degrades a young person’s feelings of self-worth and perceived performance in school. That’s why it’s essential to partner adults and children based on shared interests and expectations and to ensure they are meeting up at regular intervals, which MentorMe’s platform tracks.

If the pair jives, the results can be life-changing. Fitzpatrick, who herself benefited from mentoring, knows this firsthand. Raised by a single mom, she spent her after-school hours and summers at the Boys and Girls Club. Since graduating from Howard University in 2009, getting her first job in digital media marketing and founding a startup, she has given back by mentoring others. And her platform has helped another 6,000 volunteers find a young person to advise.

“As individuals, we may not be able to eradicate poverty; we may not be able to wipe out youth violence,” Fitzpatrick says. “But we can all start where we are, reach back and find a young person to invest in. Then, collectively, we can all be part of providing a brighter future for the next generation.”

Homepage photo courtesy of MentorMe.

Continue reading “The Low-Risk Way to Help At-Risk Kids”

Meet the Self-Starting Millennial Who’s Mentoring the Next Generation of American Leaders

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Daquan Oliver has entrepreneurialism in his blood. When he was a cute third-grader living in New Rochelle, N.Y., his mother Alison found out that he’d been wandering in a nearby housing project selling copies of “The Money Saver,” a free newspaper stuffed with coupons, door to door. “He’s trying to make his own money,” said one woman who had handed Oliver a five-dollar bill, “and I applaud him for that.”
In middle school, Oliver used his enterprising spirit to talk his way out of assignments. “With him, everything’s negotiable,” one teacher vented to Alison. But as a single mother who’d gotten pregnant at age 17 and was now working low-wage jobs around the clock, Alison wasn’t going to let her son get away with skipping homework. “You have two strikes against you. One, you’re African American. Two, you’re an African-American male,” Alison warned him. On top of his schoolwork, she assigned monthly book reports and made him copy words from the dictionary and write his own definitions in a composition notebook.
By senior year in high school, Oliver ran his own business. He bought Pop-Tarts, Capri Suns, candy and chips in bulk at Target, and three “employees” sold them to classmates, netting $1,000 in profit each month. Four years later, in 2014, as he was set to graduate from Babson College, a Massachusetts business school well known for incubating startups, Oliver founded the nonprofit WeThrive, to bring together middle and high schoolers and college students for near-peer mentoring, a model where both parties can connect emotionally over present challenges, not just distant objectives. Now 24, Oliver works in Los Angeles’s Silicon Beach and hopes WeThrive participants internalize the same lessons in entrepreneurship that helped him break the expectations of his upbringing.
For kids 13 years old and up, WeThrive’s mentoring program consists of at least eight weekly, 90-minute sessions on entrepreneurship. So far this semester, more than 100 have signed up to work with college students from Columbia, Cornell, Syracuse and the University of California, Los Angeles. Oliver thinks children learn best when doing, so the course is focused on launching an actual business. By the second class, groups “choose a problem that has a product or service-based solution,” and they have until the end of the semester to turn it into a working business model, Oliver says. In the past, one cohort founded UNI, an anti-bullying nonprofit, and sold water bottles that changed colors based on temperature and were emblazoned with the slogan “Be the Change.” Another started an apparel company called Difference that prints T-shirts with multicolored bar codes as an expression of individuality.
A typical WeThrive class might focus on finding a target market. Avoiding business jargon, the mentors ask: What what kind of customer would like to buy their product? A silent leader (who is discretely chosen by the mentor at the beginning of each class) manages the discussion and keeps everyone focused without calling attention to herself. Ninety minutes later, the kids fill out learning logs, writing one piece of knowledge they gained that day, how it applies to their life and how they will implement it through the next week.
Oliver wants students to learn goal setting, public speaking and personal finance, and lessons on these topics are reinforced week after week — like his mother’s vocabulary teachings — until they become habit. It doesn’t matter whether a business model finds financial success. What’s important is that those involved learn how to lead a team, assemble a team and can speak publicly about their business so that others believe in the concept and the vision.“This isn’t about creating a business; it’s about honing skills required to enter a lifestyle, so to speak.”
Oliver also wants to see them develop an emphasis on doing social good. So he seeks out participants who would have founded WeThrive if he hadn’t done it already, the students who are passionate about giving back but need a platform to get engaged.

WeThrive brings together middle and high schoolers and college students for near-peer mentoring.

Although Oliver starter WeThrive just two years ago, the idea for the nonprofit started percolating when he was a 14-year-old, a time that can be described as the worst of his life. His mother lost her hourly job, and while she looked for new work, she sent Oliver to live with his grandparents. The family soon didn’t have cash for deodorant, so he started dodging sports practice at a summer enrichment program. Several times, he and his mother skipped meals.
“He started getting that hopeless feeling. He was worried about the next move, how things were going to change, if they were going to change at all,” Alison recalls. “The situation, it kind of placed him in a position where he had to be a grown-up for a little bit. And when I say grown up, I mean as far as his thoughts, as far as processing things.”
Late one night, Oliver couldn’t fall asleep. He felt sick, sweating in his sheets. Normally a happy-go-lucky kid, his mind kept replaying how many hours his mother worked and how little her hard labor paid off. But in a sudden epiphany, he realized it wasn’t his mother’s fault. A structural barrier had “always been holding us here.” He promised himself that he would overcome it and return home to assist those like him.
That moment was where Oliver first came up with his definition of entrepreneurship, a broader approach — a lifestyle, really — beyond simple business advice. “Turning obstacles into opportunities,” he phrases it, adapting Niccolò Machiavelli’s definition from “The Prince.” “Every time I see a challenge, I think entrepreneurially about it and think my way through it.”
Jasmine Robinson, leader of the WeThrive chapter at Cornell, at Clubs and Organizations Fest.

As WeThrive expands across the country, Oliver is looking for a way to beef up the curriculum’s incorporation of the latest technology, such as offering intros to coding or hosting off-site discussion via Slack. And he’s introducing more behavioral metrics to see if the lessons are changing behavior. Are kids reading more for pleasure, for instance, and do they feel they have a positive influence on their peers? Oliver admits it will be nearly impossible to gauge whether WeThrive has an impact on grades or graduation rates, since there’s a myriad of factors that affect academic success, but he hopes to determine whether entrepreneurship is becoming part of his students’ daily lives.
One can wonder if, in creating WeThrive, Oliver simply put together the education he wished he had on those tough days at his grandparent’s house in New Rochelle. But Oliver disputes that. “Maybe if I had this program, I wouldn’t be able to do the things that enabled me to live out my dreams.”
Oliver has seen more ups and downs than most who are twice his age. He knows what failure looks like; it surrounded him in his neighborhood and his high school classes. But at WeThrive, he’s getting — and sharing — a glimpse of success.
MORE: This 23-Year-Old Has Figured Out a Way to Make Kids Want to Attend Summer School 

How Can One Nonprofit Solve Two Big Problems Facing Both Veterans and Low-Income Kids?

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Bob Kincaid, co-founder of the Chattanooga, Tenn.-based Get Veterans Involved (GVI), has found that it’s possible to kill two birds with one stone. His nonprofit helps two groups — veterans who struggle when they return from service, and elementary school kids in need of mentors — at the same time.
How is that possible?
While veterans train for new jobs or attend college, the organization pays them to visit local elementary schools each week.
“They’ve got no mission. No purpose. The hope is to give them purpose,” Kincaid tells the Times Free Press. “If we can have these service members recognize these kids need them, we have a mission for them.”
Kincaid believes the program, which kicked off in five elementary schools this year, will help veterans feel connected to their community as they work to make a smooth transition into civilian life. Additionally, the work will help low-income kids in innumerable ways. “We mentor the kids, who then mentor the vets,” he adds.
Instead of having the vets come to the schools with a lesson to teach or a talk to give, GVI instructs them to simply help out in whatever way the classroom teachers need them to. One basic task the veterans assist with at Calvin Donaldson Elementary, for example, is helping kindergartners learn their ABCs.
Principal Cherrye Robertson says, “Right now all of my kindergartners know all of their letters, which is phenomenal. We’ve never had all the kindergartners in the whole building know all their letters at this time of year.”
With early successes, GVI is aiming to expand through funding and donations. GVI co-founder Ron White says, “The vision is for this one day to be in school districts around the country.”
MORE: For Female Veterans Experiencing Employment Woes, This Organization Offers Strong Advice

Overcoming a Difficult Childhood, This Former Marine Is on a Mission to Help Others

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After growing up near Chicago and bouncing around five different group homes and 13 foster families, Tina Thomas found the stability and sense of belonging that she lacked by enlisting in the Marines when she was 18 years old.
“Growing up in the foster care system left me feeling empty and incomplete,” she tells Rich Polt of Talking Good.
Thomas was inspired to serve after working as a peer mentor at a summer camp for children who’d been victims of abuse. Thomas, too, suffered physical and sexual abuse during her years in the foster care system, but she never lets it define her. “If I’m a victim of sexual trauma and foster care, the statistics say I’m supposed to be a certain way. But I’m me…I’m not a number,” she says.
Thomas mentored kids at the summer camp every year until its funding was eliminated, an experience that made her realize, “I wanted to make an impact on people’s lives.”
For four years, Thomas served in the Marines before struggling to find a civilian job. Finally, she landed in Washington, D.C., where she works for the Federal Aviation Administration as an administrative assistant.
The 34-year-old Thomas has never stopped serving others and is now a member of The Mission Continues’ DC 1st Service Platoon, a nonprofit that organizes veterans to solve problems and help others in their community. “All of this service work provides me with structure and growth. It keeps me motivated and gets me out there so that I can continue to make a difference,” she says.
Even though she had little support growing up, Thomas continues to be a shining example of the impact one individual can make through a commitment to service. She tells Polk she hopes her legacy will be “that even at my lowest points in life, I’ve still reached out to help others to lift them higher.”
MORE: Salute the Nonprofit that Helps Vets Continue to Serve When They Return Home

A Nonprofit Specializing in Second Chances Gives One to an Aurora Theater Shooting Victim

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After Marcus Weaver graduated from college, he landed in jail — a bumpy start to adulthood resulting from poor choices that he came to recognize were influenced by growing up with an abusive stepfather.
Weaver became determined to turn his life around, so when he was released from jail about eight years ago, he went to live at New Genesis, a transitional housing space in Denver. “They offered me a job,” he tells Elizabeth Hernandez of the Denver Post, “and I didn’t screw it up.”
Weaver did much more than just not screw up — he began to help his fellow shelter residents find job placements, clothes for work and places to live. Through his efforts, Weaver connected with DenverWorks, a nonprofit that helps find employment for low-income people with disabilities, criminal records and past addictions. The organization found a job for Weaver: working for them as a mentor to others.
“It felt really great, like this was my purpose,” he says. “If you can give a person a job, that changes everything for them. I felt really good for the first time in my life.”
But then on July 20, 2012, Weaver decided to see the premier of the film “The Dark Knight Rises” with a friend. Chaos erupted when a gunman opened fire inside the theater, killing Weaver’s friend, Rebecca Wingo, and shooting Weaver in the arm.
The trauma of losing his friend and suffering a serious injury on that horrific night rattled him, and he was unable to continue his job. Finally he went to therapy and was diagnosed with PTSD.
Even though Weaver’s arm is still not healed — another surgery is scheduled for November — in March he felt ready to apply for jobs. He found himself back at DenverWorks and now serves as their outreach coordinator since the nonprofit believed that everything he’d been through would make him a big asset mentoring people trying to right their lives after suffering hard knocks.
“I see a lot of my former self in the people I’m helping. You see them change. Get a suit, get an interview, get the job. It’s so important,” says Weaver.
Currently finishing up a degree in nonprofit management, Weaver hopes it might lead to starting his own nonprofit. However lofty his goals, anyone familiar with Marcus Weaver’s life story knows it would be foolish to ever count him out.
MORE: No Longer Afraid: A Young Immigrant Victim of the Aurora Theater Shooting Steps Out of the Shadows

With Odds Stacked Against Them, This Group Is Helping to Build Self-Esteem in Young Black Women

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“Babies raising babies,” is how Tracey Wilson Mourning, a former journalist and wife of retired Miami Heat basketball player Alonzo Mourning, describes the group of teenage girls carrying their children near her neighborhood in Florida to The Root.
“I wondered, ‘Which one am I?’ out of that group, had it not been for the mommy I had, had it not been for the amazing women in my life,” she says.
This questioning led Mourning to start a mentoring group for young black women called Honey Shine.
Since 2002, the organization has been reaching out to young black women in Florida, offering group mentorship, a six-week summer day camp and bi-monthly workshops focused on education, health, nutrition, sex and drug education, and making goals for the future. The participants are called “Honey Bugs,” and sharing warmth and affection among the generations is a big part of Honey Shine’s mission.
Honey Shine turns even fun events into learning experiences. For example, a back-to-school shopping trip sponsored by Forever21 that helped 100 girls pick out clothes for school was also an opportunity to teach the Honey Bugs about budgeting and “shopping smart.”
Mourning tells The Root that these girls benefit from guidance in all aspects of their lives. “I know a lot of these young girls don’t have that mom that I had, don’t have those people pulling them up by their coattails or taking them outside of their neighborhoods,” she says. “We have girls that come from neighborhoods called ‘the Graveyard’ where two out of 12 are graduating from high school. Not on our watch.”
Most of all, Mourning wants Honey Shine to show the girls the possibilities that await them if they stay out of trouble and get an education: “[Women] run companies. We own companies. We influence the world,” Mourning says. “And if our girls see that, what a difference that makes. Self-esteem is a powerful tool. We all make dumb mistakes when our self-esteem is low, and I don’t know anyone immune from that, but I feel like if we build self-esteem in our young girls…it makes the world of difference.”
MORE: When These Low-Income Women Needed Help, They Found An Answer in Each Other

Could Mentors Be the Key to Lifting Families Out of Poverty?

Posted on by robbie

Countless programs have perfected the mentoring model between kids and adults. But what about a mentoring program for all adults?
For more than a decade, the nonprofit Circles USA has proved that mentors can help low-income adults thrive. Scott Miller started the organization (which pairs those struggling with poverty with higher-income coaches) back in 2000 as, according to the website, “a way to increase the capacities of communities to address poverty.” There are now local Circles branches in 23 states.
The mentors help guide their mentees through such important tasks as polishing a resume, negotiating debt repayments, setting up a bill-paying system, finding a job, and ensuring good childcare. Each week, participants meet together for support and to discuss life strategies.
Cynthia Bowers interviewed Miller in 2011 for CBS News. “If you’re in poverty in this country, it is just a day-to-day grind to get things done,” Miller said. “So very intelligent, very emotionally capable people are stuck in this cycle of non-stop problem solving. And so people coming along and lifting some of that burden is huge.”
But easing that burden is difficult. While Bowers noted that the drop out rate for the program is high — 58 percent — those who do stay involved in Circles reap big rewards: “Our research now shows that their income is going up on average 48 percent. Their assets are going up by 115 percent and their welfare is going down by 36 percent.”
In December, the Circles program in Coshocton, Ohio graduated its first class of leaders who will guide their own Circles groups. One of the new leaders is Larry Stottsberry, who told Mark Fortune of the Coshocton Beacon, “Being a veteran, being out of the military, and thinking you can be successful, sometimes you get down in a rut, something had to bring me out of it. This group brought me out…This is more about showing people that are struggling that you care about them when you are together. It’s more about helping each other out even if you don’t have anything to help them out with. It’s like my mom and dad always said, ‘Even though you don’t get anything for Christmas, it’s being there and sharing love.'”
With generous people like Larry Stottsberry signing on to help those less fortunate then themselves every year, the circle of success is bound to continue.
MORE: These Programs for the Poor Preserve Dignity and Demand Accountability–and They’re Working