A spate of gunfire in Chicago since Friday has killed at least nine people and wounded more than two dozen others. Police blame gangs for at least 14 of the shootings. On Monday, the city launched a mentoring program that aims to steer juvenile offenders away from gang activity. If successful, it could be a national model.
Typical youth-mentoring programs center on social activities like a museum outing or dinner date. But research suggests that approach doesn’t do much in the long run for juvenile offenders.
So Chicago has snared a $400,000 federal grant to see how those kids respond to a different approach. The city’s Department of Children and Youth Services is organizing what it has dubbed “economic mentoring.”
ambi: Meeting.
The department on Monday gathered dozens of business and nonprofit professionals, mostly African American men. Assistant Commissioner Azim Ramelize said he wants to pair each with an 8th-, 9th- or 10th-grade boy on the city’s South Side who’s been in trouble with the law.
RAMELIZE: We have to begin getting in our kids head that if you go on down the street and you break a bottle and you break glass, that sends the value of your community down. These are the things we need to be telling our kids and we’re not. We’re going to provide case workers to follow the kids. All I want you to do is mentor them. You don’t have to be a social worker. Just mentor them.
That attention will focus on career development.
GREEN: There’s definitely a difference taking a mentee downtown to a sporting event versus taking that same person to your job.
Joe Green III raises corporate money for Columbia College. He agreed to become one of 48 mentors the city hopes to line up before school lets out for summer.
GREEN: Exposure is probably the best introduction to opening up a child’s mind to the world of possibilities available to him or her.
The mentors will meet with their protégées three times a month. The kids will also participate in a book club and a financial-education course. For that, the city is raising some extra funds. It wants to give each protégée $300 to invest however he sees fit. When the kids graduate from high school, the plan is for them to visit Africa or Latin America for a service project.
STURTEVANT BORDEN: This combination of practices is a new model.
Cindy Sturtevant Borden of the National Mentoring Partnership says the rest of the country should watch closely.
To evaluate the program, the city has teamed up with scholars from Loyola University and the University of Illinois at Chicago. They’ll compare the protégées to kids who don’t receive the mentoring. The data will include school grades, any criminal violations and signs of self-esteem.