An unlikely meeting

As part of our ongoing Mentors of Color campaign, a recruitment campaign to target new mentors of color and enhance the cultural competency of mentoring programs, we are pleased to be able to highlight mentors of color making an impact in the community during Black History Month.

This guest post is written by Derrick Duplessy, executive director of the Duplessy Foundation. Derrick is a member of the Mentors of Color advisory council. If you would like more information about the Mentors of Color campaign, please email Bernice Osborne, manager of the Mentors of Color campaign, at bosborne@massmentors.org.

It’s funny how, where, and why mentoring takes place. I want to tell you a story about a mentoring relationship that developed in an unlikely scenario.

My good friend Warren, used to live in South Boston and we played basketball on a court near a church on East Third Street. It was an interesting time for me personally because I was working as an executive consultant yet I still felt the need to find and pursue my calling. Basketball with Warren was a way of clearing my head and putting those worries down for an hour or two.

There was one young man who kept wanting to play. Let’s be clear, he had no chance against me and I proceeded to soundly beat him on the basketball court in almost every game we played. His teams would lose to mine and one-on-one the results were even worse. Ten years his senior and dramatically shorter (he is 6’2 and I am 5’7), I kept beating him. He got so fed up that he actually asked me to teach him about basketball. I thought to myself, “what a bizarre request.” I took him up just to see how far he would go and how much constructive criticism he could take.

The lessons

I found out that the young man’s name was Mike. He liked Manu Ginobili, so I called him Manu. He called me Dwyane Wade. Mike was a junior in high school and he seemed pretty smart. When I would ask him about his future plans, he would shrug and shoot a horrible-looking shot. He told me that he was diagnosed with ADHD and figured out that “school wasn’t for people like me.” I wanted to help him get over that mental barrier and find some career that he could make him happy.

Over the next year and a half, I taught him how to shoot, play defense, run the pick and roll, and play in the post (sorry for the inside basketball, non-sports fans). He ate it up. He got frustrated and cussed me out too. I was so frustrated because he had this strange sense of entitlement and he would take very little responsibility for the losses. I knew at the very least, the lessons were making him feel something. Although the win/loss ratio was lopsided in my favor, he started to eke out wins. I saw his confidence growing and trust building.

Two pivotal moments made it all worth the effort for me. One day we were playing and it was a close game. We would always play to seven points and continue if one person did not win by 2 points. It was an epic game as we were making shot after shot. He beat me. That was not the incredible part. He concentrated and cleared his mind of any doubt about his ability or his perceived inferiority to me and others. I knew from that point on that he would not have to get lessons from me – he would take responsibility to learn more on his own.

Eventually over time, I learned that Mike wanted to become a sports broadcaster. I thought he could do it too. This guy could not shut up about sports. His favorite was basketball, but he had encyclopedic knowledge of players and teams of every sport. I challenged him to read Bill Simmon’s 700 page “Book of Basketball” in a week. I asked him to write 500 words about each 100 pages he read in a blog, every day. I did the same and fell behind. He actually read the book, did the blog entries, and did it on time. I saw his confidence growing and trust building.

The epilogue

Today, Mike is one of the fellows in Duplessy Foundation’s Purpose Fellowship program. The program prepares 18 to 24-year-old artists not enrolled in four-year college that grew in up in Boston for community leadership. He is taking a writing composition course at Roxbury Community College and his first two grades were both an A-. He wants to continue taking classes and is bringing up what were once unfathomable ideas like degrees and graduation. Most importantly, he now knows that he can be a sports broadcaster and he is taking personal responsibility for his success.

Derrick and his mentee, Mike

Writing this story makes me feel like a part of Dr. King’s dream is truly coming to fruition. As you can see in this picture, I am black and Mike is white. A white young man trusting and seeking guidance from a black man in a mentoring relationship is pretty cool. On a personal note, he helped me realize that while I was getting away from thinking about my calling on the basketball court, it was staring me right in the face.

Big Sister’s success with our back-to-school campaign

Nikki White is the recruitment coordinator at Big Sister Association of Greater Boston

At Big Sister Association of Greater Boston, our mission is to help girls realize their full potential by providing them with positive mentoring relationship with women. This year, our goal is to serve 3,000 girls, which we do through our Community-Based and School-Based 1-1 Mentoring and our Group programs.

The School-Based program, in which we partner with nearly 30 schools and community sites, is where we focused our marketing efforts for Mass Mentoring Partnership’s Back-to-School Mentor Recruitment Campaign. This one-to-one mentoring program creates matches between elementary school girls and women mentors. They meet once a week throughout the academic year, at the girl’s school either during her lunchtime or after-school program. Each match decides how to spend their time together, whether it’s playing board games, reading a book together, or reviewing homework assignments.

We designed three strategies with the seed grant we were awarded through this campaign. First, we promoted our Facebook presence and brand visibility through Facebook ads directed to our page. Second, we promoted our School-Based program through Facebook ads directing to our website and targeting the hard-to-reach neighborhoods of Charlestown, Dorchester, and Quincy. Third, we are placing ads in neighborhood e-newspapers directed towards our School-Based program in those same neighborhoods for National Mentoring Month in January.

The first strategy increased our “likes” on Facebook in November by 57% with 40 new likes in one week. We moved from 18 daily users of our page to 64. Although we had been seeing consistent growth of traffic to our Facebook page, we hadn’t seen this large of an increase before.

For the second strategy, we saw the same click-through rate of 133 being directed towards our Become a Big Sister page. In the week prior to our campaign, we saw 1.8% of the people who went to the Big Sister Association website come from Facebook. In the week of the campaign, 12% of the people going to our website were coming from Facebook. In November, we had also seen correlations in the increase of applications and inquiries coming in through the media.

The third strategy that we are going to implement is placing School-Based ads in specific neighborhood newspapers in Dorchester, Charlestown and Quincy in January when college students are coming back from school vacation.

We know that the back-to-school months are a crucial time to recruit women mentors. Fall is the start of a new year for many women. It is the season where college-age women fall back into the college schedule and it is also a time where working women have come back from a variety of summer activities and are ready to be involved in their community. By being able to create targeted Facebook advertisements during this busy time, it allowed us to reach women who we may not have been able to reach through typical event recruitment.