Mentor program hopes to build leaders from Athens Middle School and OU Women’s Center.
It’s not very often that a middle school student can say they’re friends with a college kid.
The Ohio University Women’s Center is stepping out of its home at Baker University Center 403 and is headed over to Athens Middle School in its newest mentorship program, Young Women Leaders.
The program aims to match up about seven or eight middle school girls with college women who will be picked from a pool of applicants.
The idea came from Women’s Center student worker, Leah Brown, who got involved with the center because of it. The junior studying African American Studies said she was a part of a similar program as a middle school student in Virginia, and it’s still a part of her life today.
“When I first started the program, I definitely wasn’t super confident in myself and gaining more leadership skills and understanding interpersonal relationships better — it was definitely something that helped me out in the long run,” Brown said. “I’m still in contact with my ‘big sister’ from middle school.”
Brown has been working with the OU Women’s Center as well as the University of Virginia Women’s Center she had been exposed to when she was younger. Alongside her, Women’s Center graduate assistant Emily Burns, a second-year master’s of public administration candidate, has been helping her with the logistics of the project. Burns works with the mentor program within OU.
“Even though I didn’t personally go through the program, middle school was a pretty terrible time for me, as I think it can be for many people,” Burns said. “I definitely feel strongly that this is something that can help sort of alleviate that burden and make middle school a little bit easier, in whatever sense possible.”
As the mentors will apply to the program, the middle school students will be selected by Emily Rittenhouse, Athens Middle School guidance counselor. While Burns and Brown are not in the school, Rittenhouse has been their pinpoint person within the school, selecting girls who she thinks would fit the program, Burns said.
Applications for mentors are due Oct. 31 and the pairs will be handed out in the spring semester. Burns said they had to take this semester to plan the logistics, but ideally it will be a fall and spring semester program.
The program consists of weekly meetings for the mentors to prepare them for the also weekly group meetings with mentors and mentees. The pairs then will decide on how they would like to meet together four other times in the month.
Susanne Dietzel, director of the Women’s Center, said this is an opportunity for young women to grow and learn in confidence and leadership skills.
“(Middle School is) usually when we see a drop in girl’s self confidence,” Dietzel said. “This is usually when we see bullying starting. That is when we see competition between girls increasing.”
Burns said she knows personally how terrible middle school can be and maybe this can provide a support system and new relationships to help girls get through. Brown said she wants to see the same.
“It’s kind of like a new support system, so they have people outside of their regular adults and people that they can go to, that they can talk to about things that they wouldn’t want to talk to their parents about,” Brown said. “It’s a really intimate situation where you build a bond that nobody else can have with you, and it’s pretty cool.”
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