From Mentorship to Friendship

It is never easy for anyone to make the decision to seek guidance (become a mentee) or to give guidance (become a mentor) and we were no different.  YUTE’s mentorship programme placed together two strangers who would not have met under normal circumstances, to form a mentor-mentee relationship. It was with the use of training, tools, and hope that YUTE set out to bridge the gap between young persons living in inner city communities, and hundreds of volunteer mentors, sometimes from starkly different backgrounds.

I am a trained, full-time Accountant, pursuing a Master of Business Administration degree in International Management. I am also a mother of a small child. At the time of our matching, my mentee, Cadeisha Campbell, was an unemployed young lady living in Greenwich Town, Kingston 13, a community where many outsiders believe “nothing good exists.”

We both opted to participate in the YUTE Mentorship programme in 2013 for two different reasons. I wanted to provide any type of guidance I could and Cadeisha was seeking a fresh outlook on life.  The programme consisted of training (both for the mentees and the mentors) and a subsequent ‘meet and greet’ session was held to allow the mentees to select the person they wanted to mentor them. The choice was given to the mentee, providing them with an advantage of assessing the mentors, identifying who they believed they would be most comfortable with, as well as having someone with similar interests. This, I understood, was to remove or reduce many of the challenges that could arise.

I was selected by an aspiring Accountant. This was a plus for me given my training and experience in Accounting. We spoke in a relaxed manner without the usual barriers of getting to know each other. This might be unconventional to other mentee-mentor relationships, but we tried not to put any additional rules to govern our relationship, other than the ones demanded by the programme.

We met on several occasions during the first year of our relationship. In the beginning, we would meet in a comfortable public location and we communicated at least twice per week. Later on, I traveled to Cadeisha’s home to meet her mother and friends and similarly, she was invited to meet my family and friends, as well as, accompany me to a Toastmaster’s Meeting.

The relationship grew from us having a mentor – protégé relationship to a genuine and abiding friendship.  We found several common areas of interest that we consistently build upon. We are both Christians and therefore incorporate church, trips to Boone Hall Oasis, the movies, and dinners etc. We have removed any constraints we might have in communicating with each other. Cadeisha knows that she can call me about anything and this goes both ways. The mentor-mentee relationship is a two-way street requiring both parties to give and always to take.

We are thankful for the YUTE Mentorship programme that brought us together. From our experience, it is important to communicate even when you don’t want to about the good and the bad.  This is important as the mentee wants to know that they are helping too, so it is always good to tell them not just about your success, but about your failures.

We have renamed the relationship that joined us together (mentor-mentee) to one of friendship, where we continue to be pushed, encourage, challenge and have fun with each other. Now that Cadeisha has been employed as an Administrative Assistant with YUTE for more than a year, she too can lend her skills to empower other young people and use experience with mentoring relationships for those engaged in the YUTE programme.

YUTE’s mentorship programme is a very good initiative to guide and motivate youth in the inner city who do not have any role models. Now Cadeisha and hundreds of others have mentors with whom they can identify–someone they can look up to.

All it requires is for us to care for each other!!!!!

By YUTE Mentor Verona Dorman

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