Mentor Alabama helps ‘at-risk’ kids

Midge Robinson didn’t see how she could squeeze another hour into her overcrowded schedule. Wife, mother of three, grandmother, realtor and church secretary, her plate was about as full as they come. Yet when her church asked for volunteers to tutor students at the local elementary school, she couldn’t say no.
   
“I’ve tried hard to get my church involved in missions, so I had to be willing, too,” said Mrs. Robinson, a member of Wilsonville Baptist Church in Shelby Association.
   
Last fall she began helping Clint, a slow reader who is repeating the second grade. Every Tuesday night, she and Clint spend an hour together at the church. Sometimes she reads to him, sometimes he reads to her. Carefully sounding out each letter, Clint takes so long to read a page that by the time he gets to the end, he has already forgotten what he read at the beginning.
   
“I don’t think he reads at home,” said Mrs. Robinson. “He used to carry the same book around for weeks without opening it. I can tell he has started reading some, because now he will talk about a book and discuss it with his friends.”
   
Churches might call what Mrs. Robinson is doing missions work, but Attorney General Bill Pryor calls it mentoring. Through his Mentor Alabama initiative, he hopes to enroll 2,002 appropriate, caring adults from all segments of society as mentors and role models for at-risk youth such as Clint by the year 2002.
   
“Studies clearly show that positive adult involvement in the lives of young persons helps them to raise their goals, remain drug-free and perform better in school,” Pryor said. “This is especially important when you consider that from 1985 to 1995, our state’s juvenile arrest rate rose at the unconscionable rate of 144 percent.”
   
Mentor Alabama isn’t a program but a clearinghouse for existing youth-serving organizations and individual volunteers who want to become involved with youth to register at one place. It includes a statewide database of existing mentoring organizations, as well as school-based and faith-based mentoring opportunities  throughout Alabama. The database, which started in August 2000 with 130 entries, now lists more than 200 such opportunities.
   
While the initiative promotes all types of mentoring, including one-to-one, team, school-based, workplace-based and faith-based, Pryor believes that the faith community has an opportunity to reach youth in a way that is unique to any other segment of society.
   
“It is my belief that persons of faith are a source of great potential in the lives of our state’s youth,” Pryor told 300 leaders of Alabama’s faith community at his 2001 Faith Summit on Mentoring recently.
   
Pryor said he is concerned about the future of Alabama’s youth, because they are making too many bad decisions.
   
After talking with youth at each of the state’s juvenile correctional facilities, he concluded that the common denominator among them is the lack of a consistent, positive adult role model in their lives.
   
“I believe the faith community has the best chance to reach our youth,” Pryor said at the summit. “I believe it’s important for leaders of the faith community to encourage their members to reach out to young persons inside and outside of their fellowship long before these youths become involved in crime, drugs or violence. I am asking you, as a leader whose vocation is to build the kingdom of God, to become actively involved in mentoring and to mobilize your members to reach our at-risk families and youth before they choose the wrong path.”
   
Youth are considered “at risk” when they lack the support, counsel, friendship, reinforcement and constructive example of an adult role model, said Lynn Childs, Pryor’s director of constituent affairs. “They can come from all economic backgrounds and all types of homes,” she said.
   
She said churches that want to mentor youth can go through existing youth-serving organizations, such as Big Brother-Big Sister or the Scouts, or they can start their own programs.
    
“They might want to partner with a local school,” Childs said.