This National Mentoring Day, Here’s Why We Need to Talk About Girls | Kelly Fair
Mentoring is as American as apple pie. It’s part of all of us. Just think about the power and impact that one positive influence can have on anyone, from any community. Wherever each of us is today it’s because someone invested in us or we connected with a role model in the public eye who inspired us and provided us with necessary support, modeling or mentorship. I know this is true for me.
When I was growing up in the late 80s and 90s we had Take Your Daughter to Work Day. I don’t know how I got wind of it, but I told my dad: “I’m going with you to work.” It was amazing to have the opportunity to experience a day in the life of a professional at such a young age, and something that would have a profound impact on me and my career journey. Years later, it would become the inspiration for a program I wanted to create for girls who otherwise wouldn’t have that opportunity that I did as a young girl.
As a teen, I was also mentored by the pages of Essence magazine. Back then, it was really the only place I could find positive images of Black women. They were beautiful, they were bold, and they were career women. I wanted to be just like them. So at 13 years old, instead of spending the summer at day camp, I got my first job at a beauty college where strong female supervisors mentored me and helped me grow.
Because I was a girl who was mentored, I created Polished Pebbles Girls Mentoring Program. In the last 12 years, we’ve worked with over 5,000 African-American and Latinx girls, providing more than 500 mentors to girls in over 100 schools in Chicagoland, Indiana, Texas and North Carolina. I see myself as a service provider and an advocate. And on days like today I’m especially proud to advocate for girls mentoring, because there are some urgent needs — and solutions — that we don’t talk enough about.
Something we do hear a lot of when we talk about girls’ programs is oh that’s nice, that’s cute, that’s sweet. But I don’t see it that way. Mentoring girls is not cute and sweet — it’s critically important. There’s a definite need to invest in girls, especially those who are growing up in under-resourced areas where a range of disparities are stacked up against them.
One of these disparities, which we don’t hear enough about, is the disparity in boys and girls programming. I wish I could say we’ve seen a positive shift towards equity in the last decade, but we haven’t. There is, justly, a lot of attention given to the plight of low-income, Black boys in urban communities; the threats and harm they face are very real, and they absolutely deserve our attention, better care, and more resources. But so do Black and Brown girls.
Many people don’t know that Black girls face higher rates of suspension, detention and expulsion than any other group of girls. They’re also the fastest growing segment in the juvenile justice system. But we don’t tend to hear about Black girls when we talk about the school-to-prison pipeline. That’s got to change. With more awareness and a fuller understanding of the challenges that Black and Brown girls specifically face, we can start scaling solutions that work — like mentoring.
Mentoring creates possibilities and positive pathways for all of us — mentees and mentors. One of the things I love most about my job is getting non-traditional industry and company leaders on board with investing in girls from an early age. Our Pink Hard Hat Project is introducing a whole generation of girls to careers in construction, engineering, manufacturing and the skilled trades.
Girls get exposed to new ideas and powerful role models — women and men — and discover that there’s a dynamic career path available to them in an industry that’s eager to hire more women. Meanwhile, our mentors and allies learn the value of sharing their experience and see firsthand the impact they can have through mentorship.
When it comes to mentoring, there’s space for all of us. There’s a whole ecosystem of mentoring — whether it’s taking someone under your wing, offering a job shadow opportunity, being a pen pal to a young person, using your professional skill set to support an organization, or donating and sharing posts on social media — there are countless ways to keep the cycle of mentoring going. This National Mentoring Day I encourage all of us to celebrate the impact that mentoring has undoubtedly had on each of us, and use our collective power to create that same opportunity for another young person.
