Showing posts with label Children's Hospital. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Children's Hospital. Show all posts
Tuesday, December 13, 2011
CHLA 2011-2012 Matching Session
In this session, mentors and mentees were matched and got to know each other through the mentor/mentee interview and introduced each other to the rest of the group!
Thursday, November 17, 2011
CHLA 2011-2012 Getting to Know You Sesion
CHLA mentors and mentees were given another opportunity to get to know each other. Each mentor and mentee were able to have quick individual discussion with one another. After the session, the mentors and mentees choose their top three picks. By next session, they will find out who they are matched up with!
Wednesday, November 9, 2011
CHLA Meet and Greet
CHLA's first group sesssion: mentors and mentess got together and interacted through different activities, discussions, pizza and chaos bowling.
Tuesday, June 14, 2011
CHLA SR I Game of Life
Mentees get a taste of life by going through a life size version of "the Game of Life"!
Friday, May 13, 2011
CHLA Junior I - Mentee Summit
Mentors take a sit back and practice their active listening skills as mentees engage in a dialouge/discussion with one another. Our youth today are often silence by adults and what the mentee summmit does is allow a space for the youth to speak about what's on their minds without any adults input or interruption. It is always amazing to hear how much our youth have to say.
Tuesday, May 10, 2011
CHLA Senior I Reach for Your Dreams
Mentors and Mentees went through a community building activity and helped each other "reach for their dreams".
Tuesday, April 12, 2011
CHLA Senior I Family Night
Mentors meet their mentees families and families learn more about what YMC is all about.
Tuesday, March 29, 2011
CHLA JR I Trust Walk/Fall
Mentors and mentees does various activities based on trust. This is a time where mentors and mentees realize how important trust is in a relationship.
Monday, March 21, 2011
Wednesday, March 2, 2011
CHLA JR Fantasy Island
Mentors and mentees draw out their neighborhoods and share what's similiar and different in their neighborhoods. After, mentors and mentees would create an ideal world they would want to live in together.
Tuesday, February 15, 2011
Childrens Hospital Seniors I Cohort - Choas Bowling
CHLA Senior I Cohort - Returning mentor+mentee matches were able to play a full game of bowling while new mentors and mentess played "chaos bowling". Each mentor was seperated into different lanes and were given truth or dare questions. Each mentee would rotate between mentors, bowl, and play truth or dare.
Friday, January 28, 2011
CHLA JR Family Night
Mentors get a chance to meet the families of the Mentees and learn about how they are a significant part of a mentee's life.
Friday, January 14, 2011
CHLA IV How Do You Like Me Now
Mentor/Mentee matches battle out to see how well they know each other.
Thursday, January 13, 2011
Encourage a friend to become a mentor: January is National Mentoring Month
January is National Mentoring Month and our need for mentors has never been so strong. Our Adams and Childrens Hospital programs have waiting lists of youth that need a caring adult in their life. Please pass along the above flyer to anyone you know that might be interested.
Thank you.
-monk
Tuesday, December 14, 2010
Thursday, August 19, 2010
Programs Don't Change People, Relationships Do
Follow The Gang Money: Part One
In 2008, the city of Los Angeles decided to move all the cities gang money under one roof and this program was called Gang Reduction Youth Development (GRYD). The program targeted youth from areas of Los Angeles that were considered to be more gang intensive. The programs provided by GRYD fall into two categories: prevention and intervention. The intervention programs are geared towards 10-15 year olds who are at high-risk of joining a gang while the prevention programs target teenagers and young adults who are already in gangs, strongly affiliated with one, or part of a tagging crew. The programs provide things such as job training, mentoring , and/or counseling for the youth.
In order to “qualify” for the programs, youth must take the Youth Services Eligibility Tool (YSET). This tool asks the youth extremely personal and incriminating questions regarding their past drug involvement, criminal history, family history, etc. Experts from USC who developed this tool, concluded that a young person must display a combination of four or more risk factors (i.e. home life, past trauma, drug use, and general mental health) in order to qualify for prevention services. The problem with such a tool is that the individual taking the assessment tool must be willing to be open and honest with such sensitive information. How many times have you asked a teenager a question and they have lied? Teens lie; it’s a fact and why wouldn’t they lie about such topics when a stranger or social worker is administering this assessment? Now the question is, how many of the young people who did not qualify for services truly not quality or were too embarrassed, ashamed, or angry to share the correct information?
Not only are there issues with the way the young people are selected but there are also issues with the overall results of the GRYD program. Many worry that millions of dollars are being spent on a program that may not be any significant positive results. According to Mayor Villaraigosa crime in GRYD zones has dropped by 10.7% over the past year but critics say there is no specific evidence that this decrease is due to the programs implemented, more cops, etc. The truth is, the city dropped the ball with a lot of aspects of the GRYD program. There are claims that money is just being handed out to people or organizations that are not providing great results and while that may be true in some cases, I can think of at least one organization that is truly producing great results. Youth Mentoring Connection has four mentoring programs for which they partner with Children’s Hospital of Los Angeles. The funding received for these programs comes from the GRYD program.
The ways in which the lives of these young people have been transformed are extremely difficult to capture in conventional forms of evidence and data. Evaluators of the programs say that after participating in the programs, youth feel better about themselves but their behavior does not improve. Such “observations” are the difficult ones for me to process because the ways in which such conclusions are drawn are unclear. One program is not going to rid a young person of the harsh realities they must face every day which can lead them to embrace certain behaviors for survival purposes. What a program can do is begin to awaken the young people so they can look past the gangs and violent behavior that surrounds them. Evaluators should not only attend the mentoring sessions that YMC has at Rio Park in North East Los Angeles to get the evidence they need but maybe they should also allow the people who actually implement the programs determine what changes they have seen in the young people. The youth will not open up about the ways they’re mind set, attitudes, or feelings have changed with someone they do not feel safe with. In the programs we do, we create a community and a safe space for the youth to feel safe. At our family nights or closure sessions these young people talk about how much their mentors and staff have positively influenced them and how they have changed. Beyond that, staff gets to know these young people and their stories which allows them to know who really is not associating themselves with certain crews or gangs, who is no longer doing drugs or has cut back, etc. Ultimately, the people who really get to see the changes in these young people are the mentors, staff, and families; not the evaluators.
The difficulty in trying to capture these results in a “study” is tremendous. I believe that academics and researchers need to find better ways to connect theory to practice. A simple collaboration between academics (in this case USC) and organizations who actually do the work is not enough. While academia and action are both equally important in the social justice movement, the roll of an academic in action needs to be embraced. It is not enough to have a professor do research and gain information from reliable sources who are the ones on the ground doing the work; academics must embrace the fact that many things can be lost in translation without first hand work experience. People on all sides of the movement like legislatures, educators, organizers, academics, school administrators etc must have experience in working with the target population. How else will we humanize the process and results? We CANNOT expect young people to “change” because of a program; we must build the connections, relationships, and support systems that will foster such results.
My life’s work is to truly be an academic in action: a person who can connect to the people who the change must come for while also consistently tying those connections and realities to her research and innovative methods and ways to continue to improve our communities.
Agueda
It's time for our annual campaign drive! Partner with us to mentor our youth from the threats of gang violence, drugs, and dropping out of school. Everyone who donates will be entered to win two tickets to our benefit concert with Jackson Browne in October.
YOUR DONATION WILL CHANGE LIVES! Donate here: Youth Mentoring Connection Annual Campaign
In 2008, the city of Los Angeles decided to move all the cities gang money under one roof and this program was called Gang Reduction Youth Development (GRYD). The program targeted youth from areas of Los Angeles that were considered to be more gang intensive. The programs provided by GRYD fall into two categories: prevention and intervention. The intervention programs are geared towards 10-15 year olds who are at high-risk of joining a gang while the prevention programs target teenagers and young adults who are already in gangs, strongly affiliated with one, or part of a tagging crew. The programs provide things such as job training, mentoring , and/or counseling for the youth.
In order to “qualify” for the programs, youth must take the Youth Services Eligibility Tool (YSET). This tool asks the youth extremely personal and incriminating questions regarding their past drug involvement, criminal history, family history, etc. Experts from USC who developed this tool, concluded that a young person must display a combination of four or more risk factors (i.e. home life, past trauma, drug use, and general mental health) in order to qualify for prevention services. The problem with such a tool is that the individual taking the assessment tool must be willing to be open and honest with such sensitive information. How many times have you asked a teenager a question and they have lied? Teens lie; it’s a fact and why wouldn’t they lie about such topics when a stranger or social worker is administering this assessment? Now the question is, how many of the young people who did not qualify for services truly not quality or were too embarrassed, ashamed, or angry to share the correct information?
Not only are there issues with the way the young people are selected but there are also issues with the overall results of the GRYD program. Many worry that millions of dollars are being spent on a program that may not be any significant positive results. According to Mayor Villaraigosa crime in GRYD zones has dropped by 10.7% over the past year but critics say there is no specific evidence that this decrease is due to the programs implemented, more cops, etc. The truth is, the city dropped the ball with a lot of aspects of the GRYD program. There are claims that money is just being handed out to people or organizations that are not providing great results and while that may be true in some cases, I can think of at least one organization that is truly producing great results. Youth Mentoring Connection has four mentoring programs for which they partner with Children’s Hospital of Los Angeles. The funding received for these programs comes from the GRYD program.
The ways in which the lives of these young people have been transformed are extremely difficult to capture in conventional forms of evidence and data. Evaluators of the programs say that after participating in the programs, youth feel better about themselves but their behavior does not improve. Such “observations” are the difficult ones for me to process because the ways in which such conclusions are drawn are unclear. One program is not going to rid a young person of the harsh realities they must face every day which can lead them to embrace certain behaviors for survival purposes. What a program can do is begin to awaken the young people so they can look past the gangs and violent behavior that surrounds them. Evaluators should not only attend the mentoring sessions that YMC has at Rio Park in North East Los Angeles to get the evidence they need but maybe they should also allow the people who actually implement the programs determine what changes they have seen in the young people. The youth will not open up about the ways they’re mind set, attitudes, or feelings have changed with someone they do not feel safe with. In the programs we do, we create a community and a safe space for the youth to feel safe. At our family nights or closure sessions these young people talk about how much their mentors and staff have positively influenced them and how they have changed. Beyond that, staff gets to know these young people and their stories which allows them to know who really is not associating themselves with certain crews or gangs, who is no longer doing drugs or has cut back, etc. Ultimately, the people who really get to see the changes in these young people are the mentors, staff, and families; not the evaluators.
The difficulty in trying to capture these results in a “study” is tremendous. I believe that academics and researchers need to find better ways to connect theory to practice. A simple collaboration between academics (in this case USC) and organizations who actually do the work is not enough. While academia and action are both equally important in the social justice movement, the roll of an academic in action needs to be embraced. It is not enough to have a professor do research and gain information from reliable sources who are the ones on the ground doing the work; academics must embrace the fact that many things can be lost in translation without first hand work experience. People on all sides of the movement like legislatures, educators, organizers, academics, school administrators etc must have experience in working with the target population. How else will we humanize the process and results? We CANNOT expect young people to “change” because of a program; we must build the connections, relationships, and support systems that will foster such results.
My life’s work is to truly be an academic in action: a person who can connect to the people who the change must come for while also consistently tying those connections and realities to her research and innovative methods and ways to continue to improve our communities.
Agueda
It's time for our annual campaign drive! Partner with us to mentor our youth from the threats of gang violence, drugs, and dropping out of school. Everyone who donates will be entered to win two tickets to our benefit concert with Jackson Browne in October.
YOUR DONATION WILL CHANGE LIVES! Donate here: Youth Mentoring Connection Annual Campaign
Wednesday, September 23, 2009
We're looking for a few good mentors...
We're looking for a few... well actually a whole lot of new mentors for our new programs starting up. Please help us spread the word. As Tony mentioned in his blog, "if you reduce your time in front of the TV by 5%, you can use that time to mentor a young person in one of Youth Mentoring Connection's programs"
Couldn't have said it better, Tony! Please help us spread the word. The pitch is below.
Domo Arigato!
-monk
Be a Mentor for At-Risk Youth
Youth Mentoring Connection has a 10-year history of delivering worksite- and community-based mentoring programs serving "at-risk" teens throughout Los Angeles. Our mentoring programs are relationship-based - through developing a trusting relationship with a caring, consistent adult, our youth are able to develop more trust and esteem in themselves.
We provide the necessary structure and support to help mentoring matches succeed. Mentors and mentees meet twice a month, for nine months, on a set calendar. One meeting each month is a "Group" session, where all 30 mentor-mentee pairs meet together for facilitated group activities to build trust, community, relationship skills, and life skills. The other session each month is a "One-on-One," where mentors and mentees go off to do activities of their own choosing (dinner, movie, ball game, etc.) We are currently seeking mentors for two programs that meet on Thursdays from 5:30-7:30pm. Our Adams Program is scheduled to begin October 1st, meets near USC and focuses on middle school youth. The Children’s Hospital Program will begin November 5th and takes place in North East Los Angeles in Cypress Park with youth ages 10-15.
Staff provide extensive training and support to mentors - our goal is to be there for you so you can be there for our youth! No special skills are required, just the desire to help a young person reach his or her full potential. Mentors should be age 21 or over, and own or have regular access to a vehicle. We ask that mentors be able to keep their commitment to their mentee through attending the scheduled group and one-on-one sessions, and making one phone or email contact in the off weeks. We ask mentors to show up, role model participation, be genuine, and be themselves. We conduct an interview, background check, and mentor training to ensure the safety of our youth, and to prepare mentors for what to expect. From there - the rest of the magic happens on its own through the mentoring process!
Interested? Please email Monk Turner, Program Coordinator, at monk@youthmentoring.org, or call us at 323-731-8080 x105 if you have any questions. If you're ready to go, you can simply apply online. We look forward to hearing from you!
Wednesday, July 1, 2009
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