Reaching across class lines doesn’t have to be a barrier for potential mentors
Donna Beegle grew up in a migrant worker family. She married at 15, had two children and at 25 was divorced, lacking both education and job skills. But with the help of mentors, she worked her way through college and graduate school and finished a doctorate in educational leadership from Portland State University in 2000.
Beegle had this advice for middle-class mentors during a workshop at the recent Our Kids: Our Business event at Spokane Falls Community College:
Fight the poverty, not the people living in it.
Middle-class mentors sometimes approach poor kids as if they have grown up with the same rules, expectations and skills. They haven’t.
Beegle told the story of a “multimillionaire” acquaintance who was mentoring a teen in need of a summer job. The mentor told the teen to get his birth certificate so he could get an ID card. “The kid didn’t do it,” Beegle said. “He didn’t know how to.” The disappointed mentor then helped him get the birth certificate and they both went to the Department of Motor Vehicles for an ID card. The teen was told he needed yet another piece of identification. The mentor was exasperated. He now “wants to start an institute against systemic barriers” facing the poor as they search for work, Beegle said.
Get into the schools.
For some children living in poverty, school is a constant stressor. Getting there, staying there, asking for homework help from parents who flash back to their own school stress.
“Most people living in poverty never had a meaningful relationship with someone who has benefited from the educational system,” Beegle explained.
Understand the “why” behind the behavior.
Middle-class mentors are often surprised when they visit the homes of children they mentor and see big-screen TVs, iPods and cell phones, Beegle said. Poor people “will do anything to belong. In the United States, what do we teach people they need to belong? Material possessions.”
In a mentoring relationship, Beegle said, the most important thing is “to meet people where they are, not where you want them to be.”