By Diccon Hyatt
Trenton Downtowner
The walls of the MentorPower office in Lawrenceville
are lined with photos of the hundreds of Trenton-area
students who have gone through its mentoring
program in the last 13 years. All of them graduated
from high school, three quarters went on to
college.
And Maureen Quinn, the director of MentorPower and
one of three employees, remembers most of them,
their names, and what has become of them since
they have completed the program.
In the photos, the teens are doing things like
designing hot air balloons, counting microbes in
swamp water and teaching elementary school
classes.
“They love it,” Quinn says proudly. “Put them in a tough
situation and challenge them and they’ll
learn.”
Sometimes it’s not hard to keep track of them,
because they keep coming back to be mentors
themselves or just to say hi, like the woman who burst
through the door while Quinn was being interviewed
by a reporter and gave her a hug.
The Mentor Power program is about linking high
school students with a mentor in the field of science
or the environment.
Mentor Power recruits from the average, not the
honors, classes in school. The goal is to find
students who have potential, but who might not have
otherwise become involved in the fields of science,
technology, or the environment.
“We’re not social workers, but we’re interested in
creating for kids … a way to transcend the obstacles
in their life and help them succeed. We have some
really smart kids that leak in from the top, and a
couple who are really difficult that come in through the
bottom, but the general idea is helping the average
kid who’s pretty well ignored,” she said.
For 2007, the nonprofit group has hooked up about 70
teams of mentors and mentees and given each a
project to work on over the course of the year.
The above portion of this article can be found on
the Trenton Downtowner website, Feb. '07 issue.
http://www.trentondowntowner.com/
Olivia Carpenter(Pictured on left) of NJ Dept
Environmental Protection and Karisa Williams
(pictured on right) of Trenton High School and
Satellites are polluting space. Space Junk. This is
just one of scores of pairs of mentor/mentee
partnerships listed on the Mentor Power NJ site.
Executive Director, Maureen Quinn says, "In 13 years
our mentees have received 34,000 hours of one to
one mentor time. Ten began in 1993 and 60 were
part of the program in 2006.
Since 1993, instead of gangs, instead of dropping out,
instead of hopelessness many students chose
MentorPower (formerly EnvironMentors), a place of
academic achievement, acceptance and
inspiration."
