This journal is a collection of my experiences as a Mosaic Mentor to 10 amazing girls at Ark Franklin Primary School from April 2015 to July 2015.
The title 60:1:10 stands for 60 minutes: 1ce a week: for 10 weeks which symbolises the structure of the primary school mentoring programme where we mentored girls for 1 hour every Thursday for 10 weeks.
This has been a remarkable experience and the start of a new passion; it is amazing how 1 hour a week can absolutely change your life!
Chapter 2: Oh my! What have I signed up for?
So the application has been put in, I have been selected, sent the information pack and invited for a training day! Great news right? WRONG!
Queue the anxiety, second guessing and sweat patches.
I spend the day speaking to two of my colleagues with mentoring experience hoping to hear all the nice fluffy stories you would expect; “You will change lives on a daily basis”, “It feels like nothing else” etc.
WRONG AGAIN!
Instead I get (and I quote):
- I doubt the kids will curse at you on the first day
- Their mums are involved as well? Good luck!
I remember getting teary eyed speaking to a colleague about how nervous I was that I would be terrible at it, and as someone who hates failure this was the worst thing I could ever imagine.
(It is important to say that I did get very useful advice from my colleagues and their pep talks helped me see that it is a great thing to do; so a massive thank you for them).
For the rest of the week every time I thought about it my heart would skip; till today I cannot tell you exactly what I was worried about.
Without the training I did not know what to expect and I became very worried, so I decided to think about it in a very simplistic way.
“I will not be changing the lives of children, for the one hour they are with me it means they cannot be doing something negative elsewhere.”
Mosaic is grateful to the support of Criterion Capital and the Players of the People’s Postcode Lottery, without whom the Mosaic Primary School Programme wouldn’t be possible.
Giving young people the chance to shine through leadership and enterprise is vital. For young people growing up in some of our most deprived communities, Mosaic’s work does just that. Your work helps to build binds between different communities and I wish you every success....