Monique Apodaca, the young mother trying to get her life on track, said something that led me to the corner of West 23rd Avenue and Julian Street on Thursday night.
This is the office of Save Our Youth, a 16-year-old nonprofit that matches mentors with young people who ask for them. Donna Garcia was working at Save Our Youth when she became Monique’s mentor. SOY asks mentors for a one-year commitment, but most stay for four years or more. This is a credit to SOY, which sees itself as not so much a program for young people but as one that trains and supports adults who want to mentor. Kids at risk will always outnumber adults willing to care about and for another person’s child.
The logic, then, is simple: Fail the mentor. Fail the child. Fail the child, we fail ourselves.
Garcia was Monique’s mentor for seven years. Monique was referring to Donna when she said: “She showed me another way to live. She was the first person who believed in me.”
Eleven years in this city, many of them spent talking to and writing about kids, has persuaded me that this one adult, mentor, teacher, coach, is the best way — in some cases, the only way — to help kids who have only known lives of chaos, whose mothers and fathers have never been parents, whose inheritance is poverty and dysfunction.
One adult who can open a door to futures that, until then, were neither dreams deferred nor denied, but dreams not yet conceived.
Thursday night at the SOY offices was a mentor training night. As Monique says and I paraphrase: Your parents may not care about you, but other people do.
I want to meet some of the other people. Mentoring is not to be undertaken lightly. It is a commitment, not a flirtation. Many of these young people are used to adults walking out on them. Some, and Monique was one, will try to circumvent what they believe is an inevitability by trying to push the mentor away.
So, as the would-be mentors take their seats around a conference table in the basement of the SOY offices, Jill Meyer, director of programs and training, says: “This is not a project. This is not, ‘Oh, I’m going to work with this kid and feel good about myself.’ This is a relationship.”
She speaks this night to five people. Three men, two women. My first thought is that they are younger than I expected. All are in their 20s, except Hunter Beaumont, who is 35. He is the pastor of Fellowship Denver Church and says that since he’d been urging his congregation to mentor, he thought he should practice what he preaches.
Beaumont is not the only pastor present. David Cederquist, 27, is pastor of Providence Bible Church. The other three are: Eloise Barrow, a pretrial officer with the city and county of Denver; Holly Joann Johnson, an artist and lead care manager of an Alzheimer’s unit in Denver; and Josh Fruchtman, a physical therapist.
They heard about SOY at their churches, which is not surprising since the nonprofit is a faith-based organization, though it asks its mentors not to evangelize. Luis Villareal, founder and executive director of SOY, likes to say “caring for someone else’s child is not natural; it is supernatural.”
It’s the kind of thing you might expect a pastor to say, which, in fact, Villareal, a psychotherapist by training, once was.
I assume their faith has led them to mentor. Yes, they say, and no. “It’s more like a tugging that won’t go away,” Josh says.
They say they are curious. They enjoy being around young people. They have a desire to learn as well as to teach. They are fairly typical of SOY’s mentors, middle- class folks, most of them white, matched with low-income youth, most of them minorities. Much of the three-hour session is devoted to potential differences of class and culture, lessons that come with warnings not to stereotype or presume.
“People don’t generally like leaving their comfort zone,” Meyer says. “But if nobody models what it means to serve, if nobody leaves their comfort zone for the sake of humanity, what a sorry world we will have.”
At one point, she asks everyone to line up at the back of the room. She asks: Were you close to extended family growing up? Did you live in a rural area when you were growing up? Did your family receive a daily newspaper? Did you suffer physical, emotional or sexual abuse? Did you have both your mother and father growing up? Did either of your parents drop out of high school? Did either of your parents graduate from college? Did someone in your family have an addiction?”
The mentors take a step forward or back depending on the answer to each. Soon, they are staggered across the room.
“Did you have control of these things as a child?” she asks. “Your kids didn’t either. Each of them will come with potential assets and liabilities. Your job is to remember we all deserve a chance. We all deserve to be affirmed. That’s the joy of this.”
Sometime, within the next two weeks, the mentors will be matched with their kids. They’ll meet their families.
Before I leave, I ask Meyer how many kids had requested mentors. SOY caps the list at 100. As of Thursday night, 60 boys and 30 girls were waiting.
Tina Griego writes Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. Reach her at 303-954-1416 or tgriego@denverpost.com.
