What Mentoring Can Do for a Teen Facing Poverty

Poverty is a hardship that afflicts billions of people all over the world. These difficult conditions can make things harder than ever on the growing teenagers. If you want to make a difference in their lives, consider becoming a mentor for teens in poverty.

Give Them More Confidence

As children grow up, they need a strong support system to help them feel like they can continue on to do great things in their lives. Children who grow up in poverty often don’t have as big of a support system as those with more financial security. Their parents may need to work several jobs to provide for their children, which gives them less time to mentor their children themselves. Children and teeangers need reassurance from adults to develop the kind of confidence that will propel them forward in life. When you become a teen mentor, you get to step into the role of pep-talker. You have the opportunity to instill a sense of pride and confidence into these teens that may have struggled with it their whole lives. The confidence you give them could give them the strength to do great things.

Provide Further Opportunities

It is incredibly difficult to get out of poverty if you were born into it. Often, teens that grow up in poverty don’t have the same opportunities other teenagers have. A mentorship program can help them have access to opportunities that can help them better themselves. For example, 95% of the teenagers that New Pathways for Youth works with graduate high school. By comparison, only 20-50% of teenagers in poverty graduate high school at a national level. New Pathways gives these students the tools they need to succeed. The mentors in these programs help teenagers with their studies, and give them the push they need to graduate high school. Becoming a youth mentor makes you a direct part of this. You have the opportunity to make a big difference in these teenagers’ lives.

Strengthen Your Community

The teenagers of today are the adults of tomorrow. The generation that is growing up right now will be the one to make big changes in the future. If you become a mentor for youth, you have the opportunity to teach the rising generation about how to handle difficult situations. By doing this, you are creating a stronger community in the future. You are also able to strengthen your community today by coming to know more people within it. You may not have interacted with many of the youth in your community yet, but doing so can help you not only grow closer to them, but their parents as well. 

Being a teenager is hard. With all of the hormone changes, as well as the growing responsibility of getting older, there’s a lot teenagers have to go through. However, teenagers that grow up in poverty have it twice as difficult. Becoming a mentor for these youth with New Pathways For Youth gives you the opportunity to make a big difference in their lives.

Donate to New Pathways For Youth by clicking here!