by Julia Sundstrom
Mesa County Partners is celebrating its 40th anniversary this year. Since 1977, the non-profit started serving the Grand Valley by mentoring youth ages 8 to 18.
According to the Mesa County Partners website, their mission statement is to make a difference in the lives of young people by helping them to develop a positive self-image, a sense of belonging and acceptance of responsibility for their actions.
To live up this motto, Mesa County Partners offers three separate programs within their organization. These include mentoring, restitution work program and Western Colorado Conservation Corps. Each of these programs provides a variety of diverse opportunities for individuals.
“There are a lot of ways to get involved and being a mentor is one of them,” Mentoring Program Manager Blake Ammon said.
Mentorship is a relationship between influential sponsors to another younger individual. The purpose of mentoring is to provide a positive adult role model to adolescents, who need a healthy influence in their lives.
Mentors establish healthy communication, trust and respect where their lives might not have the same stability of a consistent role model. In the end, the hope is that those individuals raise the children’s self-esteem and outlook in life.
“The biggest need is we have a lot of boys, who don’t have positive men in their lives; dad’s not around or not as much as he should be,” Ammon said. “They just don’t have that positive male men [figure] in their lives.”
The program approximately has 200 children, 90 partnerships and 100 children on a waitlist for a mentor. Out of those 100 children, 80 of them are boys and 20 of them are girls. The program’s mentorship allows mentors to spend three hours a week for one whole year with their mentee.
“Part of what we do when kids come in and when they are matched up with a senior partner, they take a questionnaire,” Mesa County Partners Executive Director Jill Derrieux said.
At the beginning and end of the mentorship, children take a quiz regarding personal information from their perspective on how they feel about life to mentoring and an additional survey depending on their age where it examines their use of drugs or alcohol.
“Then we send all those results to a research company in Denver called Omni that does the statistical analysis,” Derrieux said. “It shows a huge decrease in likelihood of abusing drugs and alcohol, increase to bonding with adults, increase in school performance, pretty much everything goes up.”
The Restitution Work Program creates a better impact in lives of crime victims and juvenile offenders from Mesa County. This program is rather unique, due to the area; there is no other program within the county that partners with the crime victims and juvenile offenders.
“The county doesn’t have the facilities or any of the infrastructure to handle those programs, so we do it for them,” Derrieux said.
In 2016, Mesa County Partners helped $80,000 paid back to crime victims in Mesa County and 442 juvenile offenders completed 13,000 hours of community service.
Western Colorado Conservation Corps is another service teaching and employing 135 youth for land management that will help with higher education and essential life skills. The program is not just for youths but can be used for any college student or young adult staying over the summer. It’s a job opportunity that involves clearing tamarisk and working with Bureau of Land Management. In the end, someone can apply and earn scholarships from AmeriCorps.
“Time and money, we need them both,” Derrieux said.
Colorado Mesa University students can also get involved with several volunteer opportunities at Mesa County Partners.
“We have a couple of students fulfilling hours they need for classes,” Ammon said. “We have a social work intern through Mesa from the social work program. We have a couple of professors, who are mentors as well.”
Mesa County Partners is in need of mentors willing to commit to spending three hours a week for one full. There are many kids and teenagers out there waiting for a mentor. To become a mentor, the website is www.mesapartners.org and the phone number is 970-245-5555.
