Recognizing Mentor: The National Mentoring Partnership

Floor Speech

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Mr. President, today I would like to recognize MENTOR: The National Mentoring Partnership, the leadership of its founders, Geoffrey T. Boisi and Raymond G. Chambers, and the expansion of the mentoring field in the past quarter century.

This year, MENTOR celebrates its 25th anniversary. Its founders, Geoffrey T. Boisi and Raymond G. Chambers, were leading businessmen and philanthropists who understood the value of mentoring in their own lives. They believed passionately that the intervention of a caring adult is a critical element in the life of a young person, and they believed that every young person needs and deserves a powerful relationship that supports their growth and gives them the opportunity for success.

In 1990, Boisi and Chambers recognized the powerful impact that mentoring could have on our Nation's at-risk youth, and they started a movement to increase opportunity for all young people by establishing MENTOR. The success of Boisi's and Chambers' efforts has been remarkable. That first year, approximately 300,000 youth at risk of falling off track were paired with a caring adult through a structured mentoring program. Today, 4.5 million at-risk young people will find the support that they need in a mentoring relationship while growing up.

We know that research has found that young people with a mentor are 55 percent more likely to attend college and more than twice as likely to say that they held a leadership position in a club or sports team than young people without mentors. We also know that people who are mentored in their youth are 78 percent more likely to volunteer in their communities than those who are not mentored.

Unfortunately, despite the tremendous growth of the mentoring movement in America over the past 25 years, 1 in 3 young people, including 9 million at-risk youth, will still reach adulthood without having a mentor of any kind. This mentoring gap isolates these young people from the meaningful connections to adults that would help them to grow and succeed. Furthermore, young people are not the only ones who gain from a mentoring relationship. While mentoring empowers our children and sets them on the path to success, it also deeply enriches the lives of the adults who are partnered with them. As a mentor myself, I can attest to this profound benefit.

MENTOR has been a leader in the development of best practices to assist mentoring organizations across the country in improving their program quality. MENTOR and its network of affiliate Mentoring Partnerships has set the bar for quality in practice and has strengthened the mentoring field's capacity to deliver on the promise of mentoring.

It is clear that, in the last quarter century, MENTOR, under the leadership of its volunteer board and founders, has done tremendous work championing the advancement of mentoring practice and fostering the growth of the mentoring movement. Therefore, I ask that my colleagues join me in recognizing the accomplishments of this remarkable organization in expanding the quality and availability of mentoring for all young people in the United States, in honoring the service and leadership of MENTOR cofounders Geoffrey T. Boisi and Raymond G. Chambers and their dedication to America's youth, and in encouraging Americans to discover just how rewarding mentoring can be through volunteering with their local mentoring organization.

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