The Milwaukee Bucks, city of Milwaukee and Milwaukee Public Schools this week celebrated the launch of their joint MENTOR Greater Milwaukee initiative to help recruit volunteer mentors of youth in Milwaukee.
The organizations first announced in early 2018 their plans to spearhead a new Milwaukee affiliate of the MENTOR: The National Mentoring Partnership network, a national organization that works with local affiliates to promote youth mentorship.
The partners have set an initial goal of recruiting 1,000 new mentors in Milwaukee by the end of 2020.
“Mentoring is of the utmost importance to the entire Bucks organization,” said Peter Feigin, president of the Milwaukee Bucks and Fiserv Forum. “We aim to use our platform to engage our corporate and community partners to join in the mentoring movement and to make a lasting impact across Milwaukee and Wisconsin. We look forward to seeing what MGM can accomplish in the near and long-term future.”
Organizers said MENTOR Greater Milwaukee will help meet the demand for quality mentors in Milwaukee through recruitment, forging new collaborations, influencing public policy, increasing philanthropic support for mentoring and collecting data to measure the impact of mentoring.
“Mentors not only serve as role models, but they help students feel valued and empowered,” said Keith Posley, superintendent of Milwaukee Public Schools. “We look forward to engaging with mentors across the city who will support our students now and look to them as leaders in the decades to come.”
Research indicates that young people who have mentors are more likely to graduate from high school and attend college, engage in extracurricular activities and sports, and volunteer.
“Mentorship is an important way to connect our youth with someone who can guide them, keep them engaged and invest in their futures,” said Tom Barrett, mayor of Milwaukee.
Alicia Moore, a Milwaukee native and Marquette University graduate, has been named executive director of MGM. Moore was most recently the program coordinator for community engagement at Froedtert & the Medical College of Wisconsin.
The NBA has partnered with MENTOR in recent years as part of President Barack Obama’s My Brother’s Keeper initiative, which aimed to address opportunity gaps among young men of color. In 2014, the NBA launched an initiative to recruit 25,000 new mentors over five years, and after hitting that goal within 18 months, vowed to recruit an additional 25,000 mentors.
