Recruitment effort for mentors kicks off in Cleveland with
Susan Taylor
October 31, 2009, 3:00AM
 Allison
Carey, The PDFormer Essence editor Susan L. Taylor
now devotes herself to the job of drumming up hard-to-find black mentors. She
visited Cleveland this week to launch a local chapter of her CARES Mentoring
Movement.CLEVELAND, Ohio — A highly
recognizable figure from the world of black publishing visited Cleveland this
week to voice a hard truth: The black middle class is failing to act as role
models for young people.
Former Essence editor Susan L. Taylor, in town Wednesday to
launch a local chapter of her CARES Mentoring Movement, issued a "loud call
to action" for "able, stable" black adults to get involved and
stop defaulting on the job of mentoring black youths.
She said in an interview that it is a shame respected
organizations like Big Brothers Big Sisters have a tough time finding black
adult volunteers.
"Yet if you look at who's on the waiting list,
disproportionately, it's young black males and females," Taylor said.
Black male volunteers are in especially short supply, she
said. Numbers provided by Big Brothers Big Sisters of Greater Cleveland bear her
out: Of its 1,062 adults matched in one-on-one relationships, only 33 are black
men. Meanwhile, 260 black boys have been wait-listed.
It's not right, Taylor said, to sit back and point fingers
when a crime involving black youths makes the news. "The young people who
are doing this have lost their way -- it's just that simple. We have allowed it.
We are the solution."
Not a mentoring agency itself, the CARES Mentoring Movement
was founded in 2006 to recruit adult volunteers from the black community.
Cleveland is the 55th city to have a chapter.
At the kickoff rally, held at the Crowne Plaza Cleveland City
Centre hotel in downtown Cleveland, Taylor's forceful words motivated 150 people
to sign up to mentor, join the steering committee or make a donation, said local
chairwoman Ilinda Reese.
The standing-room-only rally was sponsored by Frasernet, a
black professionals network.
Taylor urged attendees to shove all non-essentials off their
plate, in order to be a role model to a young person.
Her feelings on the issue motivated her last year to leave the
high-profile job at Essence, a black women's magazine, and use "whatever
currency I have in my community" to raise awareness, she said.
She said mentoring has been proved to transform lives and need
not be time-consuming or expensive. She shared stories of three young people she
befriended while at the helm of Essence. Letting them peer into her daily
routine, by attending meetings and speaking engagements, cost almost nothing,
yet it gave them great career exposure.
"What they see is what they'll be," she said.
Taylor challenged black pastors to make their mark.
"Around the corner from these churches where middle-class people are
praising God are schools where kids don't have books," she said. "We
have a lot of changes to make."
Locally, an eight-person volunteer staff will continue her
work, recruiting through churches, clubs and unions and spinning the mentors off
to existing groups. For more information, call 216-323-5601 or go online to caresmentoring.com.
National CARES Menteroring Movement
By Ilinda Reese -African American Lifestyle Magazine
April-May 2010
Click Articles to View
| 
