First lady Michelle Obama joined hundreds of mentors and the young people they guide at the Library of Congress on Jan. 25 for a national summit on the value of mentoring—devoting time to helping young people achieve successful adulthood.
The summit, titled “Achieving Academic and Social Success: Supporting Youth Through Mentoring,” drew some 500 advocates of the practice to the Library for their national meeting.
Mrs. Obama, in remarks in the Library’s Coolidge Auditorium before a full house, announced a “corporate mentoring challenge,” asking corporations to allow their employees to be involved in mentoring during the coming year.
“You’re all here today because you know that in today’s world, having a mentor is more important than ever before,” she said. “Being a kid today is tougher than ever before.”
She noted that she and the president both have sponsored mentoring programs—hers for young women, his for young men—and “the benefits are undeniable. Studies have shown that young people with mentors are more likely to graduate from high school and set higher goals for themselves, and they’re less likely to skip school, use drugs, or fight.”
“Kids don’t need you to be Superman,” she said. “They just need you to be there—to be someone they can count on.”
The first lady hugged a row of “mentees” sitting on the stage in the auditorium as she came onstage and later went into the crowd to shake hands and chat with those in attendance.
In addition to Mrs. Obama’s remarks, a panel of high-ranking administration officials, including Attorney General Eric Holder, Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius, Education Secretary Arne Duncan and CEO Patrick Corvington of the Corporation for National and Community Service spoke at the summit.
Emceed by Joshua DuBois, executive director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships, the officials—even those whose parents had been a positive influence in their lives—described adults they looked up to and considered mentors.
Holder, for example, said a physician, who was a close friend of his father, helped him become interested, as a youth, in the world to which a good education eventually admitted him.
Holder noted that staff of the Justice Department had been extensively involved in mentoring when he was a U.S. attorney and had enjoyed it almost as much as the kids did. He termed it a “crime-prevention mechanism … Mentoring works on a whole bunch of levels,” he said.
The summit was sponsored by the group MENTOR, the Corporation for National and Community Service, the Harvard School of Public Health and the U.S. Department of Justice’s Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention. More information is available at the website www.nationalmentoringsummit.org.
