Mentors Become Like Family

By Louis Medina, The Bakersfield Californian

Jan. 21–Anita Madden, 31, a fourth-grade teacher at Roosevelt Elementary School, was raised in poverty in Los Banos and Fresno by a single mother who was familiar with hardships.

“My mother didn’t have the resources to make things happen or the knowledge,” said Madden, who attended Cal State Bakersfield on a track-and-field scholarship and has a master’s in curriculum and instruction. “The only way I was exposed to the finer things in life was through the mentors I grew up with. If it hadn’t been for mentors in my life, I wouldn’t be here today.”

Teachers, workers at her local Boys & Girls Club, members of her church, even her coaches were all role models for her: “My high school coaches were just like my fathers because I don’t even know who my father is,” she said.

When it came time for Madden to move down to Bakersfield for college, she said a family from her church helped her pack, drove her here from Fresno and assisted her in moving into her dorm room.

Now Madden, the single mother of a 4-year-old boy, is giving back by mentoring others through Garden Pathways, Inc.’s Family to Family Mentoring, a comprehensive program that serves both adults and youths.

One of her mentees is a teenage girl in a group home. “It’s helping her have the coping skills despite the circumstances she’s going through now,” Madden said of the experience.

Since 2002, community-based nonprofits such as Garden Pathways and other organizations that emphasize the value of mentoring have been observing January as National Mentoring Month.

Vivian Arreola, a family resource specialist with H.E.A.R.T.S. Connection of Kern County, which is staffed by parents and family members of local children with disabilities or special health care needs, said mentoring helps mentees “look for the leader that they have inside themselves but that they don’t think they have because of all the obstacles they’re up against.”

Arreola leads two Spanish-language parent-to-parent support groups, where attendees learn to express their feelings, look for resources for their kids, start putting their fear of learning English behind them, and even take a stab at leading support groups themselves. Judi McCarthy values mentoring so much that she organized two “mentoring roundtables,” in Aug. 2006 and Feb. 2007. The events were attended by representatives from scores of local community service agencies.

McCarthy is the volunteer chairwoman of the Women’s and Girls’ Fund of Kern County, a growing special-interest endowment that was established in 2005 as part of the Kern Community Foundation. She said she appreciates mentoring because, if done right, it teaches mentees many needed academic and life skills, while also showing them that they have potential and are “well worth the mentor’s time.”

“Most people in a mentoring situation need to learn the latter as much as the subject taught,” she wrote in a recent e-mail.

This spring, the Women’s and Girls’ Fund plans to award its first set of grants totalling $18,000 to organizations that emphasize education, training and mentoring.

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