The Need to Grow: C4C aiming for 1,000 mentors in 1,000 days

As we ease our way out of the pandemic and into a brand new year, I’ve been thinking about the profound changes we’ve been through as individuals and as an organization at C4C. I feel as if we’ve grown to know how much more we need to grow.

Here at Coaching 4 Change, our people and our mission have responded to patch the cracks in our schools—cracks made all the more visible by the crises of the past few years and ones that shake the foundation of our education system. What we’ve discovered is that our support is more critical than ever—to students, yes, but also to educators.

When C4C first started up years a little over a decade ago, our main mission was to match young adult mentors from diverse backgrounds to middle-grade students in afterschool programs because we could see the need and benefits of these mentoring connections. Research and our own experience have shown the importance of these relationships. There’s no doubt that children thrive academically, personally, and professionally when they have mentors in their lives. We’ve helped lift thousands of children in their spirits and their academics since our beginnings.

But as time went on, we discovered something else. The needs in our school systems go much deeper. Schools started asking us to bring mentoring into the regular school day to help take the pressure off teachers. Students weren’t the only ones feeling overwhelmed and in need of extra support. Our educators, too, were and continue to be under enormous and growing pressures as we demand them to be so much more than just teachers. The pandemic exacerbated this.

Even before COVID-19 turned our worlds upside down, teachers felt overwhelmed, unhappy, and underappreciated as we asked them to take on more with less. With the pandemic, teacher shortages and teacher resignations made the lives of those in the classrooms even more difficult. We asked them to take on even more and, more often than not, without enough resources.

Our mentors stepped in as substitutes when teachers called out sick, as one-on-one aides for students who needed extra care to not disrupt the rest of the class, as extra office help to handle administrative tasks, as interpreters between schools and families, as technical help with technology, as assistants leading lessons while teachers focused on additional duties, and more. Teachers throughout Massachusetts and Rhode Island, where we have placed our college mentors, have told us how much they have helped, and schools are asking us for additional support.

As we navigate our way into a post-pandemic world, I hope some problems may lessen. But the strains on our teachers will not go away. We have tasked them with so much. We ask them not only to be teachers, but we are leaning heavily on them to be mental health coordinators, social workers, family liaisons, interpreters, tutors, nutritionists, disciplinarians, college and trades counselors, transportation advisors, technology experts, and more. They are being asked to teach more students and more needy students with every day.

It's time to recognize the enormity of what educators do today, and to find ways to bolster them. We at C4C are growing to meet that need on several fronts.

Going forward, we are training our mentors to not only be responsive to the needs of students but also to the needs of teachers. Continuing to expand on what we have learned, we are shifting our supports to include more in-school and in-class services to help lessen the burdens on teachers. Most important, we are planning to grow our mentor ranks to meet the needs of our schools.

Over the years, we have worked with hundreds of mentors, and we are actively recruiting on college campuses to grow our mentor ranks. We are launching a new initiative beginning September 1, 2023, to bring on 1,000 mentors in 1,000 days. It’s an ambitious goal, and it will take a lot of vision, funding, and strategy to make it happen. It will take partnerships with colleges, schools, philanthropists, parents, administrators, mentors, students, and communities. But it’s important that we do make it happen.

We know at C4C that our mentoring programs have made a difference, but we can’t stop there. Our mission and mentor numbers need to expand. We know that we need to grow, and after meeting the challenges of the last few years, we’re ready to do it.