Mentorship Meets Apprenticeship To Lift Our Youth

Guest Correspondence

If you look beyond the strong campaign rhetoric of our recent presidential election, there was a cry from our cities and rural regions alike—how do we participate in this new innovation economy filled with technology, overseas competition and shrinking incomes? Locally, we are seeing promising action that will go a long way to help our youth.

Big Brothers Big Sisters of the Sun Coast just launched a new mentoring program for local high school students. The initiative is a positive community effort to better prepare our youth for life and career success right in their hometowns.

Beyond School Walls matches at-risk students with professionals at partnering businesses, who will host their “Littles” on a regular basis at their workplace. It kicked off by pairing a group of Venice High School sophomores with senior staffers at Venice Regional Bayfront Health, one of the region’s largest employers. Next, Riverview High students will meet their mentors at CAE Healthcare, a maker of medical patient simulators with customers around the globe.

For the students, opportunity abounds. Foremost, they gain an adult coach, confidante and friend at a critical point in their lives—the heart of any Big Brothers Big Sisters program. But they will also be exposed to diverse career options in a dynamically growing field (remember Health Innovation Week earlier this month?). And they’ll experience what it means to work for a large business, including the elusive but vital “soft skills” that employers bemoan as missing from newer workers—think punctuality, professional dress, communication.

At the program’s kickoff event at the hospital, Steve Cantees, who heads up high school education for Sarasota County Schools, told the students, “You are the first to step into this unique, innovative program, and that’s exciting.” Venice Regional CEO John McLain urged them, “Ask questions. Take this opportunity to learn everything you can.” I lobbed a friendly challenge to Joy Mahler, my counterpart at Big Brothers Big Sisters: Let’s try to double the number of matches lined up so far.

Showing our youth real career opportunities in a growing sector while equipping them to make responsible choices through mentorship is a worthy investment. Fortunately, innovative opportunities like this are sprouting across our region. Consider the Boys and Girls Clubs of Sarasota County’s new Tom and Debbie Shapiro Career Resource Center up the road in Sarasota. It targets 10th through 12th graders who aren’t sure about their futures and teaches them about high-demand jobs in our community—potential careers with family-sustaining wages and paths for promotion.

Through smart workforce investment, our region has learned a lot about the value of career ladders. They lift individual employees to better situations and catalyze growth for their employers, creating capacity for new workers to start climbing. Tools that power people up those ladders include targeted training and experiential learning. With efforts like Beyond School Walls and the Shapiro Career Resource Center, our community extends the strategy to our next generation of talent. We also tell them they are worth the investment.

Fundamentally, Big Brothers Big Sisters’ new workplace mentoring initiative targets a telling indicator: high school graduation rates. Job one of the program is to help ensure that these students graduate. But its holistic and forward-thinking approach also says that the participating students aren’t merely figures—they are our future.

Joy summed it up by telling her Littles, “We don’t see high school graduation as the pinnacle of your success. It’s the pathway to get there.” Or the ladder.

Mark Pritchett is president and CEO of Gulf Coast Community Foundation.

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