​The benefits of Mentoring and Academic Tutoring

Mentoring makes a difference!

All children have the potential to succeed in life and contribute to society. However, not all children get the support they need to thrive. Numerous studies have shown that mentoring makes a difference in the lives of youth, especially those that face challenging circumstances such as poverty, inadequate health care, parental incarceration, or an unstable home life. These children and young adults typically lack access to experiences and resources outside their neighborhoods or need more encouragement and attention in and out of school.   In this way, mentoring benefits kids in many ways such as:

• Improves self-esteem.
• Keeps young people in school.
• Helps to improve academic skills.
• Leads young people to resources they might not find on their own.
• Provides support for new behaviors, attitudes, and ambitions.
• Increases young people's ability to seek and keep jobs.

​A Theory in Practice

How SNFC addresses the eight key elements of PYD:

1. Physical and psychological safety:  We provide a virtual environment that is free of bullying, trauma, and crime and which respects the privacy and dignity of each youth.
2. Supportive relationships:  We create opportunities for youth to engage in our after-school program where our mentors guide them in positive group conversations concerning their education, career, and life aspirations. 
3. Opportunities to belong:  We address the basic human need for positive peer association in social settings where youth feel respected and have a sense of personal worth with other kids in their age group.
4. Support for efficacy and mattering: young people are experiencing rapid changes in their bodies and mental capabilities; and they are coming to understand their new or changing personal identities.  We use mentoring to help address these new personal identities by encouraging mutually respectful shared experiences.
5. Positive social norms: We use mentoring to help youth understand social norms, which are critical to a functioning society.  It takes some people a lifetime to fully understand how to set and accomplish positive goals; how to respectfully get along in a diverse society without judgement of fellow man/woman; and how to generally be a self-sufficient good-standing citizen.  This is one of the best aspects of mentoring: trusted adults are encouraged to pass their life-experiences and wisdom onto youth in the program. Youth benefit because in many low-income metro Atlanta communities’, we find that parents have not learned these lessons for themselves yet; therefore, they are unable to teach these lessons to their children.
6. Opportunities for skill-building:  We co-create opportunities for youth to master new competencies and life skills such as learning to select healthy food or how to safely become fit through diet and exercise; to how to complete college and job applications; how to dress for different occasions; and what it takes to get ahead and succeed in life.
7. Appropriate structure:  Our program is structured for age-appropriate mentorship to happen within our metro Atlanta local community. Our staff and volunteers are always present during mentoring activities.
8. Integration of family, school, and community efforts: Our program creates a unified partnership aligning expectations and activities that span multiple settings.  Youth may work on mind, body, and soul assignments when at home, in school, or in the community.