Young people excel at detecting when adults aren’t authentic with them. Assistant Professor Lakindra Mitchell Dove, MSW, PhD knows this from experience, interviewing participants for a new research study on youth mentorship, especially when racial or ethnic identities come up in youth/mentor relationships. Mitchell Dove found that adults hesitate and don’t know how to engage in those types of dialogues with the young people they’re mentoring. Even though young people are “primed and ready” for such discussions, adult mentors do not have the tools to engage in them.
Mitchell Dove’s study focused on youth ages 13 – 18 who are engaged in the Friends of the Children mentoring program. She’s interested in what supports and challenges racial and ethnic identity from coming up naturally in mentor/mentee relationships. A publication is currently in process, but Mitchell Dove told us about her research process and preliminary findings.
Friends of the Children is a national organization, unique in that it pays its mentors to work with the youth in their caseload. Ideally, this relationship lasts for about 12 years, from first grade through high school graduation. The local chapter in Portland, Oregon wanted to explore some of the changes they found impacting mentor engagement when their mentees reached adolescence.
Mitchell Dove has previously been involved with other projects with Friends of the Children, including a quality improvement project surveying mentors from chapters around the country. After anti-racism was identified as one of their top training needs, she was invited to develop content for training modules educating mentors on how anti-racism relates to their work with youth and adolescents. Knowing that mentors didn’t want to necessarily “be back to school,” she intentionally made those exercises less academic and more based on common experiences.
“We know diversity training is not going to change attitudes when we’re talking about implicit bias,” Mitchell Dove said. “So I structured it to create opportunities for mentors to go back to their supervisor or program manager or coworkers to talk about different scenarios and issues they’ve had.”
The organization incorporated her feedback and took the time to try to build quality training to support the development of their mentors. Now Mitchell Dove wants to focus on the young people in their programs, specifically Black youth identifying as male, female, or non-binary.
Impacting her study however was the COVID-19 pandemic.
For Mitchell Dove, Portland State University’s protocols about engaging in research during the pandemic made it pretty clear; it had to be virtual. But the youth she interviewed told her virtually about the importance of having a pre-established relationship with their mentors going into quarantine. Given the nature of the program, it was a tremendous help that many mentors already felt like a part of their mentees’ families. Some delivered weekly baskets to their mentees’ homes, filled with food or other necessities, as their way of checking in safely. Small things like that were appreciated, showing the youth that their mentors didn’t forget about them because of the pandemic experience.
Four themes stand out from Mitchell Dove’s preliminary findings. First, young people are ready, willing and capable of having what adults may consider “hard conversations” about race and ethnicity. For some youth it may be important to be matched with a mentor from the same racial or ethnic identity. But others are more concerned with having a mentor who’s open, willing, and capable of having these conversations, regardless of their background.
“The youth can read the energy of their mentors,” said Mitchell Dove. “It makes a world of difference if they’re not feeling them in some way or getting good feedback. That’s absolutely something that impacts their ability to build a relationship. They ask, ‘Are you being real or authentic with me? Or are you tyring to pull one over on me in terms of who you are as an individual?’”
Mitchell Dove argues that it’s important for mentors to be able to talk about their mishaps and mistakes as well, because they don’t always get it right.
“Instead of presenting it as if they know what they’re doing, they should acknowledge that we’re all still kind of learning,” she said. “No one’s ever truly arrived in regards to a society that continues to struggle with this particular issue.”
Mitchell Dove also found that conversations about race and ethnicity are often initiated by mentors or youth when discussing culturally specific events or opportunities. For Black males, one usual point of entry is talking about their interactions with police. Adults may try to engage, but don’t necessarily understand the contextual or cultural ways youth position themselves within their community. Mitchell Dove thinks mentors have to establish some common ground with their mentees when they engage in these conversations.
“My gut would tell me that the youth now are being socialized very differently than years before,” she said. “There’s more opportunity to talk explicitly about race and racism, which is interesting, because to some extent youth are also aware that they don’t want that to be the end-all be-all. They’re like, ‘There’s more to me than just being a Black youth or a Black male or focusing so much on identity.’”
There’s not a cookie cutter, one-way approach to these dialogues however. Mitchell Dove describes how mentors can serve as coaches or guides, possibly walking youth through culturally specific activities like the Black Student Union, clubs or even youth groups that Friends of the Children host. Natural, organic conversations that incorporate aspects of race and ethnicity aren’t the only thing the youth in her study seek. It’s also ideal for their relationships to develop over an extended period of time, where the mentor also has a connection with their mentee’s family and caregivers.
Her recommendation is for adults to start by engaging with the young people they mentor, learning what they need in the process. To encourage these dialogues, she hopes organizations like Friends of the Children will provide space, resources, or specific training to facilitate these dialogues in the future.