by Natasha Khairullah
Staff Writer
You’ve heard of the “Drive to Survive Campaign.”
In less than a month, one of Northeast Florida’s mentoring resource centers will kick off the “Drive for 5 Campaign.”
Kesler Mentoring Connection (KMC) is scheduled to launch the campaign that’s aimed at recruiting 5 percent of the employees of various Duval County-based businesses to become mentors for area youth at the beginning of June.
To kickoff the campaign, 25 of the organization’s founding members – which represent seven companies, including Haskell Companies, The Port Authority and JEA – have been invited to attend a “pep rally” on May 24 to prepare for the launch.
“We want to get everyone excited and committed,” said KMC’s Executive Director Cindy Harpman.
“And we want them to know how they can help get other businesses involved.”
KMC is a mentoring resource center that refers interested volunteers to various mentoring programs and agencies throughout the city. Its mission is to increase the quantity as well as enhance the quality of adult and child mentoring relationships, by raising public awareness about mentoring, recruiting new volunteer mentors and helping to facilitate the development of new mentoring programs, according to its Web site.
Harpman said the need for mentors is ever-present and the number of people in need of mentoring is on the rise and can be seen in the rate of students in the county that are graduating from high school and going on to pursue higher education, which is currently only at 50 percent – down from 60 percent in 2005.
“There are currently 45,000 individuals that need mentors,” said Harpman. “That’s a pretty large number to reach, so what we’re hoping for is to reach a small percentage of area employees to volunteer so that we can work our way up and eventually be able to provide nearly all of them with dedicated mentors.”
That small percentage equals 400 to 500 volunteers.
Harpman said the benefits of area business people mentoring kids has far-reaching effects and impacts the city as a whole.
“These are the kids of our future and so it’s not only great for those kids to have mentors to help them and encourage them to reach their goals, but it’s also great for the businesses because these are our future employees,” she said.
Since KMC opened in 1998, many of the youth mentored have been connected with internships and jobs as a result of the connections the organizations provided them with, said Harpman. Many of the individuals mentored come back later to be a community mentor themselves.
“In the last 10 months, we’ve trained an additional 1,300 volunteers,” said Harpman. “Their average mentor relationship is between three and four years, which is great. We just want to continue that success.”
Harpman encourages anyone interested in becoming a mentor to attend KMC’s Mentor Orientation. For a schedule of orientation dates, or for more information, call 224-2400.