Program History
College Mentors, Inc., was founded in 1995 by two Indiana University undergraduates who wanted to impact the lives of children. They assessed current youth programming and identified a gap in services for elementary school students. The founders wanted to go beyond the familiar recreational mentoring and after-school tutoring programs and offer a program with structured, substantive activities designed to yield specific results regarding youth development and educational achievement. They created a program model that paired the needs of first- through fourth-grade elementary school students with the talents and resources of undergraduates and the college campus.
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College Mentors Founders Heidi Schmidt and Kristin Huang |
Following a year of planning, College Mentors for Kids was incorporated as a nonprofit in 1996. The mentor program was piloted with 18 buddy pairs at Indiana University and 12 buddy pairs at Butler University in the 1996-1997 school year. A headquarters office was established during the summer of 1997 and four new chapters were launched in the fall of 1998. In 2008, College Mentors for Kids expanded to include first - through eighth-grade students. Currently, College Mentors serves 23 colleges and universities across Indiana, Illinois and Ohio.
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College Mentors for Kids
College Mentors for Kids Activity Topics
College Mentors for Kids’ activities rotate through three core activity topics that were deliberately selected to make youth aware of the academic and social routines of a college student's life, the human and capital resources of the college campus, and the benefits of a college education. These activity topics include higher education and career, culture and diversity and community service.
Higher education and career activities allow students to increase their awareness of college life, different careers and the training required for each. For example, the students might travel to a biology lab to learn about how plants photosynthesize, while also listening to a professor speak about botany. |
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Through culture and diversity activities the students learn about the talents and heritage of the different people who form the college community. These activities expand students' world view by exposing them to the languages, foods, visual and performing arts, and histories of groups different from themselves. |
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| Community service activities enable the children to identify and respond to needs in their community and learn about community resources. For example, the group may discuss homelessness and its causes and then assemble toiletry kits to give to clients of a local homeless shelter. These activities are empowering for the little buddies, who are often on the receiving end of social services. |
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