Lessons in Adolescence

Lessons on Formal Therapeutic Mentoring for Middle School Youth with Dr. Jessica Greenawalt

• Youth-Nex: Remaking Middle School • Season 4 • Episode 44

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This episode features a conversation with Jessica Greenawalt, Co-Founder and Executive Director of The Arthur Project, a New York City-based nonprofit mentoring program focused on students in middle school. The Arthur Project taps into the professional pipeline of social workers to provide middle schoolers with professional, not volunteer, mentors. 

In part one of their conversation, Jessica and Jason talk about how The Arthur Project got started, why it chose to focus on middle school-aged youth, the types of communities and schools the organization works in, the background of the students engaged in the program and how they come to participate in it, how and why clinical social workers-in-training are drawn to and sign up to be a mentor in the program, the additional training The Arthur Project provides them in positive youth development, and how the organization is both impacting students now and building a workforce pipeline of talented social workers dedicated to youth and community empowerment in the future.

In part two, they dive into the design of the Arthur Project’s therapeutic mentoring program, including how the mentors and students get matched, and how the programming evolved from individual mentoring relationships to also include group sessions with youth afterschool, and community service, recreational and cultural activities on weekends. They also discuss the results The Arthur Project is seeing, including the powerful concept of mattering and some of the advantages The Arthur Project sees with shorter-term relationships between mentor and mentees with intentional pass-offs. They then talk about the Arthur Project’s future plans to strategically scale its model in multiple ways.

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