mission
Youth Leadership and Mentoring
Introduction to the Helen Suzman Foundation’s Youth Leadership programme |
| The Helen Suzman Foundation is currently piloting a youth mentoring programme. The programme targets talented young people with proven leadership potential. The aim of the programme is to assist these young people in converting their potential into actual success, by developing and bolstering confidence through a mentorship programme. Critically, we also aim to promote value driven leadership, through both the mentor relationship and regular workshops organised by the HSF. We plan to select potential mentees from late high school of early university students. For the most part they should be from financially disadvantaged backgrounds, but in environments which have provided enough support to form a base on which we can build. They should already have demonstrated leadership skills and distinguished themselves in the current context. Mentors are fitted individually to each mentee. In our experience, members of the target group often react well to one-on-one interactions with an older peer. The success of these interactions seems to lie in a critical level of separation between the mentor and mentee – close enough to act as a real life role model, but far enough to avoid the messiness of friendship. There is a common base of shared experiences and goals, but with a stark gap in progress towards those goals. The pilot programme will run for the second six months of 2011, and the full programme will launch in 2012. |
