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Success Stories

Reggie & Jarell

He's a litigation lawyer at one of Richmond’s largest law firms, but Reggie Skinner remembers a time when his life’s direction was a little less certain and a mentor made all the difference.

“Did I have a mentor? Oh, yes I did,” Skinner said. “One of my mentors growing up was Alex Taylor. He’s one of the directors of the Carver Promise mentorship program and he encouraged me to go to law school.”

Because of that relationship, Skinner can attest to the importance of a mentor in providing direction and support in a child’s life. And through Carver Promise he has become a mentor himself to 6-year-old Jarell.

“He’s an awesome kid! He’s so full of life, interested in learning, an athlete with a great sense of humor and mature beyond his years,” said Skinner. “I actually feel that I get more out of it than he does.”

At Carver Elementary School, Reggie Skinner thinks his relationship with Jarell is starting to make a difference. When they met last fall, Jarell wanted to be a professional wrestler when he grew up. Now the first-grader wants to be a lawyer during the week and a professional wrestler on the weekends.

“But first I’d like to get to the 12th grade and maybe get to college,” Jarell said.

Boone & Joe

Boone Hopkins is a graduate student in the theater pedagogy program at VCU and serves as a mentor to Joe Carlson, an undergraduate student in the theater performance program.

“I look at Boone as being where I want to be. To see someone who is so focused and so much further down the road offers a beacon to show me the way," Carlson said. “Mentoring allows Joe and me to develop a professional and social relationship,” Hopkins said. “It’s not a static mentor-mentee relationship. We learn from each other.”

The VCU Graduate School Mentorship Program exposes undergraduate students to the graduate experience and gives graduate students the opportunity to develop mentoring skills.

“It’s really a rewarding relationship. What I got out of it is so much more than I expected,” Hopkins said.

Rich & Suzanne, Mentor Partners

Mentoring in partnership has allowed me to make a commitment that I know I can keep to give back to my community.

While very interested in this program, I was reluctant to participate in something whose success is rooted in the mentors' ability to have consistent and dependable interactions with students. A program whose success is achieved by developing open relationships based on the trust that you will be there when you say so. I was rather leery that I could live up to those expectations when I glanced at my work calendar.

Having a mentor partner gave me the assurance I needed to make the commitment. Knowing that I had someone to back me up when that "critical" meeting invite appeared in my inbox conflicting with my mentoring time gave me the confidence to take the step to "Yes, I can".

Rich and I both meet with our two boys weekly. We all meet together. Since we were both new to the program, this definitely took the pressure off having to figure it out on our own. It also seemed to make it easier on the boys the first few meetings to have someone else they could relate to. One boy was quiet, the other very outgoing. It was a good balance, the more talkative child taking the pressure off the quiet one.

Now that we are all (mentors and boys) into the swing of things, the partnership allows us to bounce ideas off of one another. The boys are getting a two for one deal! And they both now talk a lot. Only once so far has one of us had that "critical" meeting pop up such that only one of us could meet with the boys. But one of us was there and we did not have to cancel on them.

I would highly recommend the partnership method of mentoring. I also believe there is a lot of value in a female/male mentor partnership. Many of these children aren't exposed to positive man/woman relationships. I think we are providing a good role model of a relationship built on partnership and respect.