Mentoring kids: Try it, just an hour a week

Johannesburg - Justin Foxton came back to South Africa in 2007 after a few years in England’s clover, and met hostility. It wasn’t hostility directed at him particularly, but rather at his choice. Why come back at all? Isn’t it, rather, a luck to have the chance to leave?

Elated to be home, Foxton – who has a marketing background and was trained as an actor, director and writer – was shocked at the “wall of negativity”.

“Everybody I spoke to had the same look on their face. What the heck is he doing coming back? Hadn’t I heard that the country was going to the dogs? It was deeply troubling,” he says.

So he took a few months to examine his options, and instead of caving in to the zeitgeist, he started a campaign called Stop Crime Say Hello and an NGO called the Peace Agency, but that’s not where it ended.

“I realised I had to try to be a bigger thinker, that other South Africans tend to be that way – getting things done, quickly. And that’s amazing stuff. Yet it also feels like we’ve got a collective of millions waiting to be next, waiting to be a statistic.

“Were we expecting we could do nothing but rock up at the ballot box and anticipate everything would be peachy?”

So Foxton tapped into a positive nexus, although this can seem impossible, and, out of his umbrella NGO, started Bright Stars, a targeted mentorship campaign which is now reaching 91 children.

“Once you get going, people start to feel other things, like, we’re respecting people. And they ask, now what else can we do? It can’t stop there. We’ve all got a part to play in finding the link between the anger people feel at their treatment and their real worth as human beings. It’s too convenient to make everything another person’s problem.”

Bright Stars grew out of Foxton’s agency’s other interests – Project Dignity and The Baby House – where he became convinced that helping vulnerable children develop through being present, showing love and mentoring, could contribute to solving one of the country’s most intractable problems.

“But few people talk about it,” he says. “You can research pretty much any solution to South Africa’s issues and you’ll keep coming back to mentorship, to the story of how responsible role models can really walk alongside children.”

In the case of Bright Stars, all this takes is one hour a week with a vulnerable child for a year, and yet, as Foxton explains: “It’s difficult to ask people to do this; it can be like asking them to pull out all their teeth.

“People don’t want to hear that it takes one act at a time. They want a silver bullet. They want something that’s going to solve this overnight, but democracy works as each citizen takes responsibility. Acting together is where the real solution will come.”

Research shows that children who are mentored are 53 percent more likely to stay in school and 32 percent less likely to engage in violence.

These are critical numbers against the backdrop of disturbing figures from the Medical Research Council (see below) which show up to three children a day are killed, 45 percent of them through child abuse and neglect.

“For a child to have someone allocated to them who really stands up for them, helps to restore their self-esteem and dignity,” says Foxton.

He gives the example of a young man he’s mentored who was living alone in a shack for four years. He failed matric, was eating only two hot meals a week, but out of the Foxton’s own network of support, secured an internship at an IT company.

“If it was me or someone else, the point is that he’s making a living and has prospects because someone with resources was willing to spend that time with him. And many of our children are like this; they start with absolutely nothing.

“What do we all respond to? We want to be loved, cared for and respected. If we provide that to kids, they will usually rise to it.

“I think what unifies mentors is the ability to look beyond themselves. If you have a modicum of care for the world outside, you could be a great mentor. People worry that they won’t know what to say for an hour, but sometimes, you don’t have to say anything meaningful. You just have to show up. You just have to show the willingness to the child that you wanted to be there.

“Some of our mentors are mentoring 4-year-olds just by colouring in and drawing pictures with them.”

Bright Stars, like other top mentorship programmes such as SA-YES and Life College (see right), includes high-profile individuals and senior executives on their register. The organisation takes significant care in matching “like for like”.

“But we don’t only need the big names,” says Foxton. “We also need grannies who enjoy dancing, spending time with a child who enjoys it too.”

The point, he says, is that mentoring lifts people off the sidelines, where they might be criticising the government, and enhances their positivity about the future.

He makes an essential point about how we should also mentor our own children: “Instead of telling them about everything that is wrong, which makes us think the country is going to the dogs, we should rather be telling them that because this is their country, there’s a future here for them in making a contribution.

“It can fundamentally alter you once you start seeing the good by helping others, and it’s very important to get emotionally involved. Part of going out there and being effective is being willing to love, and in that, there’s a degree of risk. You may have your heart broken, which is also true of our own children, but this doesn’t stop people from having them.”