CRM - Empowering Leaders
Mentoring Initiative
In 2003, members of InnerCHANGE met with a focus group of young leaders from the community. We asked about the needs of the leaders themselves, and what they perceived to be the needs of the community. The potential community leaders needed support in their college studies. They felt that the most pressing need of the community was helping younger children do well in school. InnerCHANGE designed the Mentoring Initiative to support these potential leaders, and to give them a context for exercising their leadership by serving the community.
The LA team has found that when a child is involved in a mentoring relationship, it expands their understanding of the opportunities and options they have before them, encouraging them to hope and dream of what life could be like in the future. This power of a mentoring relationship is multiplied when the mentor is a college student from the neighborhood. School-aged children and adolescents are “aspirational”, desiring to be like those who are a few years older than themselves.
The Mentoring Initiative not only helps the participants with the practical skills needed for getting through college (such as writing a research paper, math requirements, or making a budget), it also provides a supportive community of students in similar situations. The mentors dream together, encourage each other, and help each other. This community, along with mentoring by InnerCHANGE staff and the financial support of the Mentoring Initiative scholarships, is a powerful support and incentive to push through the obstacles that the college students face.
Neighboring
Being a neighbor is key to the work that we do in Los Angeles. As we live incarnationally, we are able to grow in our understanding of what it means to love thy neighbor as thy self. As neighbors, we are able to build relationships within our community, thereby breaking barriers of inclusion vs. exclusion; us vs. them.
Our main objective as neighbors is to offer ourselves as a resource to residents in the community. When we make ourselves available in our community, God opens opportunities for us to build deeper relationships with our neighbors.
Neighboring does not come in one specific shape or form. Sometimes neighboring requires us to attend a birthday party, and other times it requires us to act as mediators in the midst of conflict. Neighboring can be having tea with a resident down the hall, or playing tag with the kids next door. Overall, neighboring in any form calls us to constantly focus on developing relationships with the people around us.
