Wilmington – January is National Mentoring Month, and as a long-time mentor myself, I want to take a little time to share my experiences with you, and even encourage you to become a mentor, as well, if you aren’t one already.

For more than 13 years, I have been a mentor to several young people. I truly believe each of us is the person we are today in large part because of the influence of caring adults in our lives. A parent is, ideally, every child’s best mentor, but some children need a little more support than their parents can give.

It is so important that every child in Delaware have a fair start in life, and often that means kids need more positive role models in their lives. I’ve been blessed all of my life with invaluable mentors who took me under their wings, gave me encouragement, set an example and, sometimes, gave me a “Dutch uncle talk” when I needed one. Many of my early mentors were members of my own family – my parents, my grandparents and several of my uncles, as well as a number of my teachers and coaches. Later, my mentors would include people with whom I served in the Navy who were senior to me and wiser, too. Legendary University of Delaware professor Jim Soles, now retired, has mentored me – as he has others – for much of my adult life. When I served in the U.S. House of Representatives, Congressman Lee Hamilton (D-IN), who later co-chaired the 9-11 Commission after retiring from Congress, served as invaluable mentor to me and several of my colleagues in the House. He is still a source of inspiration and advice to me to this day.

Believe it or not, when people are elected as governor of their state, they are assigned a mentor through the National Governors’ Association. And as a Senator, I help run orientation for new senators and their spouses. Part of the orientation process in for each new senator to receive two mentors to lend a helping hand to them in a person’s first two years in the Senate. One of those mentors is a Democrat. The other is a Republican.

In most cases, the people who serve in Delaware as mentors today don’t need to have any special skills or experience to be effective. They just need to be available and eager to help a child with some of their schoolwork. The empirical data is pretty clear that students who may be at risk of falling short academically oftentimes benefit from having another caring and helpful role model in their lives. Having said that, however, mentoring programs are not only advantageous to our students, but they are also rewarding to the advisor. As the young man I mentored from fourth through twelfth grade used to say when asked if I was his mentor: “We mentor each other.”

Delaware has been showing communities across the country the power of mentoring for quite a while. As governor, I helped lead a successful effort a dozen years ago to recruit some 10,000 mentors across our state. Today, mentoring has become an integral part of our school system in Delaware and is one of the keys to improving academic achievement among at-risk students.

Besides being a mentor to a seven-year-old second grader today at the Kuumba Academy in Wilmington, I’ve tried for years to help kids and mentors in other ways, and I continue to do so today. For example, in the Senate, I have cosponsored two pieces of legislation that also address mentoring.

The first, the Mentoring America’s Children Act, was introduced by Senator Hillary Clinton in the last Congress. This bill was based on joint recommendations of the MENTOR/National Mentoring Partnership, Big Brothers Big Sisters of America, and the National Collaboration for Youth. That act would have broaden the reach of mentoring to include children in foster care and those residing in communities with high rates of youth suicide. The Mentoring America’s Children Act would also allow students to gain professional skills by implementing internship programs during the school year.

I co-sponsored a second piece of legislation in the last Congress, this one along with Sen. John Kerry, called the Mentoring for All Act. The bill would create a competitive grant fund of $50 million to strengthen and grow the mentoring infrastructure across the country, and provide more support and funding to mentoring organizations. Specifically the Mentoring for All Act would create a $40 million competitive grant for existing state or local Mentoring Partnerships. These Mentoring Partnerships would then sub-grant 80 percent of this money to local mentoring programs and use the remaining 20 percent to carry out statewide activities, such as training, technical assistance, recruitment campaigns and more. The remaining $10 million would be used to establish new Mentoring Partnerships and to focus on national research, evaluation and training.

As we move forward in this new 111th Congress, I will support the Mentoring America’s Children Act and the Mentoring for All Act when they are reintroduced.

In addition to co-sponsoring these two bills, I also signed onto a letter last year to Senators Tom Harkin and Arlen Specter encouraging more funding for mentoring be added in this year’s budget.

There are thousands of students in our schools this year who would benefit greatly from having another positive role model in their lives, just like I did and – very likely – just like you did sometime in your life. I will continue to do my part, and I hope you will consider becoming a mentor, too, if you aren’t one already. The government obviously can’t solve all the challenges we face in America today. Mentors can’t solve them all either, but together mentors can help to create the workforce and the citizens that our nation needs to successfully address a number of those challenges and to do so without creating another bureaucracy or adding to our nation’s deficit. I’d say that’s a pretty good bargain for the American people, and it’s a Godsend for a lot of America’s children whose lives we can change for the better by sharing less than an hour of our time with one of them each week during their school year. 

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