The Kenyon Mentorship Program: Connecting Students to Ohio Communities Beyond Mount Vernon

Lee Nah (class of '25) began working with the Kenyon Mentorship Program (KMP) as a junior coordinator in the fall of 2021. During her first semester as a KMP volunteer, she collaborated with a Knox County elementary school student to create a project responding to screen usage by children at her mentee’s school. As volunteers for the Kenyon Mentorship Program, Kenyon students meet with children from elementary and middle schools in East Knox, Centerburg, Danville, or Fredericktown once a week. Together, the Kenyon mentor and their mentee create a unique project that engages their shared passions and interests.

Some projects are artistic, some academic, and others address community needs. Lee and her mentee decided to take the latter approach. Her mentee felt that students at his school were devoting too much time to screen time, so he and Lee developed a worksheet for students to complete with rewards given for time spent on live interpersonal interactions instead of on a screen. 

KMP gives Kenyon students the opportunity to meet and develop relationships with children who attend public schools in Knox County. Before coming to Kenyon, Lee engaged with community programs and youth organizations offered through the public school system in her home city of Chicago. As a student at Kenyon, however, most interpersonal interactions occur between young adults, so it can be difficult to develop connections with people of different ages, both older and younger. This cross-age interaction was one of the primary draws for both Lee and her fellow student coordinator, Keiko Behrens (class of '25), who joined KMP in the fall of 2022. It’s also rare for Kenyon students to engage with the Knox County community outside of Mount Vernon. One of the central goals of KMP, emphasized by staff coordinator Taylor Gingery with whom Lee and Keiko work closely, is to encourage students to build relationships with people in surrounding areas, many of which have more limited access to resources than Mount Vernon. 

The one-on-one nature of KMP is important: "I really felt like I knew the kids by the end," Keiko expressed. "I liked that the connection wasn’t one of a student and a child. I wanted them to feel like I cared about them...voluntarily, not just through a student-teacher relationship...I felt like I was friends with them at the end." Describing her experiences as a mentor, Keiko started to tear up. "I was surprised about how much the kids cared about this…I just assumed it was kind of going to be a thing that they came out and did and then we’d go our separate ways...but it ended up being a lot more than that," she reflected. At the end of their time together, Keiko's mentee gave her a drawing she'd made, and the simple gesture of a gift from someone for whom she'd grown to care for was deeply meaningful for Keiko. "I felt like I hadn’t experienced a pure emotional connection like that in a while...I think about her a lot. I put the drawing on my wall," she told me. 

In past semesters, Lee, Keiko, and other KMP volunteers worked with elementary school students in Knox County. This Spring, that is changing. Now Kenyon students will be traveling to local middle schools instead. I asked Lee and Keiko how they felt about this shift. "Middle school is a hard time… I have not been as frustrated or confused or had such a complicated relationship with myself than I did in 7th and 8th grade, and I think there’s value to that and people feel very complex things at that age—but I also think it’s a critical time in your sense of development of self and understanding who you are, and so I think it’s such a privilege to be able to work with whoever we’re going to meet [this semester]," Lee told me, exchanging a smile with Keiko. As a Psychology major, Lee also expressed concern at the ways in which the COVID-19 pandemic has impacted middle-schoolers. She emphasized the importance of approaching mentees with sensitivity. "There’s so much research going on and there’s so much buzz about what COVID has done for adults, but developmentally [we're] missing out on a few years of critical development time. [That] changes social dynamics with people," she explained.

Mentorship across ages has become increasingly important in the face of the pandemic, when so many of us have experienced a previously unknown kind of isolation. For young people still learning how to interact with the world around them, this moment in history poses a unique struggle. By emphasizing the importance of interpersonal relationships and the capacity we have to learn from one another, the Kenyon Mentorship Program attempts to revitalize a true sense of care and reciprocity between Kenyon students and the individuals in our surrounding communities.