Terrence Foushee - On Blue Ribbon Scholars (clip)

Kathryn Wall (KW): What kinds of things do the Blue Ribbon Scholars who have the individual mentors, what sorts of the things do they tend to, what are some of the things that they do together, with their mentor?

Terrence Foushee (TF): A lot of times the mentors bring their scholars, and it also depends on the age, right, so going to movies, taking students out to dinner, but also especially as some of our scholars get older, sometimes taking them on college visits, taking them to the park, lots of fun things. Some mentors do career exploration activities with their scholars, and then we also try to create opportunities for lots of our scholars and mentors to work together, so maybe that might be a service project that we do, like we do a Merritt Mill clean up every couple of months, we’ve served at different food banks, like I know for one trip for a college visit we went to Second Harvest, which is a food bank in Winston–Salem, which was really cool. We’ve also done a couple of family/mentor/scholar night outs, with the Chapel Hill Parks and Rec department, where they’ll kind of showcase all of the different programs that they have available, that hopefully mentors and scholars will utilize together. So it’s been like playing basketball, wall climbing, swimming, and even archery and pottery. So it all depends on the relationship that the scholars have developed with one another, but we also have a pretty deep matching process. It’s not like we just randomly match a scholar with a mentor. We have profiles of each scholar with things that we learned through their, sometimes their social workers or counselors, sometimes their parents, that we learn about them and then we also try to match them with the mentors that applied to the program which have their personal profile, like what their personalities are like, what kind of scholars do they think that they’ll work best with. That way we want to make sure, if at all possible, to make these relationships last longer than the two year commitment that they sign up for, and we have lots of examples of that. One of my friends who was in the Blue Ribbon program through high school, he is in his 30s with me, he is still close with his mentor, his mentor is I think in his 80s, and they’ve been friends for over 20 years. So you know the process takes a long time with matching scholars to their mentors, but that’s where the important work comes to trying to ensure that these partnerships, these relationships, last a long time.