Imagine Hope - Oct 2020
Building the Mentorship Relationship: Five Months Together
Imagine Hope is a one-year blogging project being undertaken by Caitlin Newby as she engages with Imagine LA at the deepest levels and shares her experiences and reflections.
It has been a few months since I first wrote about my mentorship journey, and I thought this month would be a good time to check back in and reflect on how the relationship with my mentee and her family has evolved since July.
To catch you up: I was matched with my mentee – a creative, soft-spoken 6-year old girl – back in May. Since then, I’ve engaged a dozen or more times with her, but also significantly with her mother to understand the family’s dynamics and how best to support my mentee.
A new mentor joined our Mentor Team in August, who would be partnered with my mentee’s mother, and I was so glad that there would be a dedicated mentor just for her. I have loved talking to my mentee’s mother while my mentee and her little sister run around in the background of our Zoom chats, but there is always room for more care and support. One of the last times we spoke, in fact, I told her that I couldn’t wait to see them in person and play with the girls for a while so that she could have a couple hours alone to herself!
The big recent development is that my mentee is back in school. As an educator myself, I was curious and concerned about how my mentee would be taught this year. She received her LAUSD-issued tablet several weeks before school began and was so excited to show me her very own, brand new iPad! Her school has also given her a huge collection of workbooks, handouts, and school supplies, which she has added to the backpack she received during Imagine LA’s Back 2 School Bash event last month (where I volunteered!). My mentee is only in the first grade, so she does not have the packed schedule and heavy workload of older students, but I have been sure to check in with her and her mother on how they are managing Distance Learning.
Since the start of the school year, we have had to move our weekly Zoom chat around to best fit our schedules. My mentee is in “class” until 1 or 2pm each weekday, and I have my own work keeping me busy. As of now, we have settled for a weekly chat on Friday afternoons, which gives us the opportunity to catch up on the week past and talk about what they are looking forward to doing over the weekend. My mentee has shown me the art projects and worksheets she has been doing for class, and they are finally going out on the weekends to visit close friends.
It has been so nice talking to my mentee, her sister, and her mother each week, seeing what new toy or art project has been occupying their interests each week, but I can tell we are all starting to feel an itch to get out from behind the computer screens. So far, I have been very cautious and adhered to all Imagine LA and LA County guidelines surrounding COVID-19, but we are looking to the not-too-distant-future and hoping that we can soon meet in person, even for a quick chat outside.
They will be moving to a new apartment in about a month, part of an exciting project that Imagine LA has been working on in Marina del Rey and which I will be covering for next month’s post. The complex has a children’s play area, which would make a great first “outing” for my mentee and me, though we would also love to explore the neighborhood for the nearest parks and libraries. You don’t even have to have a library card to go in and read a book or attend a story time session (though the libraries are currently still closed). They won’t be too far away from the beach, too, which would also make for a great outing.
All this will have to wait, however, until they move into their brand-new apartment, a truly exciting milestone in their lives that I would be so excited to be a part of!