Community Collaboration with Affinity Mentoring
Kent District Library
Innovation Synopsis
KDL partners with Affinity Mentoring, a non-profit dedicated to providing individual, one hour per week mentoring at risk children in multiple school districts. Cultivating brave spaces like this amplifies the voices of young agents of change for a diverse and inclusive community and helps our staff connect, in meaningful, timely and relevant ways.
Challenge/Opportunity
Increasing access, presence and representation of under-served communities is a journey that requires intentionality in the direction of our efforts and investment, as well as longtime commitment that can consistently facilitate organizational change. But, in the end, organizational or community transformation can only happen when staff are open to allowing their own personal change. This can be challenging, if exposure to the reality and worldview of another group happens only through literature or secondhand content.
Key Elements of Innovation
Our Human Resources Department has pledged to pay staff that serve as mentors. The commitment extends to other organizations working with other populations such as CASA –Court Appointed Special Advocates- and Tree Tops Collective, who works with newly arrived woman immigrants and their families. The experience has extended beyond our own organization, and this has increased visibility of the impact that these types of organizations provide.
Achieved Outcomes
We are honored to be in the third year of this experience, and our relationship with Affinity Mentoring has grown, not only in the number of mentors that we have been able to recruit inside our own organization (15 in 2021), but also in the ways we participate in their efforts to create a collective narrative that uses “US” instead of “THEM”.
