While Skillmation doesn’t host its own mentoring programs, we team up with the best organizations in the community to supply them with mentors. Here are all the organizations we are currently partnered with. Let us know if you’d like to get involved!
PTHS Ninth Grade Community Mentoring Program
This program brings every ninth grade student at Port Townsend High School together with mentors to discuss problem solving strategies, communication, and leadership abilities, among other 21st century leadership skills. Two to three students are matched with a mentor and then meet once a month as a group in the school’s library. Mentors are encouraged to attend a mentor gathering the week before meeting with their mentees, to discuss that month’s topic and explore strategies for how to best present the material and support their mentees in the process.
This is a great opportunity to create a meaningful relationship with a student and give them an opportunity to engage on an adult level with someone other than a relative or a teacher. You can be an incredibly important step on a ninth graders journey to adulthood!
PTHS Senior Project Mentors
Every senior at Port Townsend High School is required to complete a senior project. Senior projects involve either a career exploration or a community service project. A supporting scholarly paper and at least 40 hours of project work are required. An integral part of the project is that each student has a Senior Project Mentor, to guide them in all the different stages of their project. You have the chance to help a high school senior investigate and cultivate their burgeoning career or service goals at a pivotal moment in their life.
Skillmation provides senior teachers with a list of mentors wanting to be a Senior Project Mentor and the topic areas for which they are appropriate. Each mentor specifies their skill set so as to be paired with the most appropriate project for their area of expertise. The projects are career and community oriented-- past projects have included volunteering at the boiler room, directing plays at Blue Heron, and organizing an environmental clean-up event.
If you want to be a senior project mentor please let Skillmation know and we will put you on the list for next year.
Blue Heron Middle School Early Release Wednesday Enrichment & Tutoring Program
Offered every early release Wednesday in January, February, and March, this program provides free tutoring opportunities, nutritious snacks, and access to a multitude of engaging enrichment activities including computer coding, yoga, and bicycle repair. Skillmation supplies both the tutors and the people who want to offer enrichment activities. One hour of tutoring is followed by a snack and then one hour of activity. This is a great way for children who have nothing to do after early release on Wednesdays to catch up on schoolwork, learn new skills, and have fun in the process. If you would like to get involved, either through tutoring or teaching an activity, click here!
YEA! Music at Salish Coast Elementary
This after school music program believes that “music is beneficial to the overall development of children including their intellectual, emotional, and social development.” Therefore they integrate the musical learning process with academic mentoring, creating a space in which the practical skills gained from learning to play music are combined with the practical skills needed to succeed academically. Meeting every Tuesday and Thursday from 2:30 to 4:30, students spend the first hour receiving academic tutoring and the second receiving musical instruction.
If you are interested in becoming an academic mentor {or a musical instructor}, click here!
YMCA Building Futures Program
Building Futures is a school-based mentoring program throughout Jefferson County, that matches local students with caring, supportive, and stable adult mentors. Mentors and their “Buddies” meet for one hour per week on school grounds, where they play games, read, make crafts, tell stories, and more!
These students are referred to the Y by their teachers, and occasionally by their parents, as children who would benefit from having some one-on-one time with a caring adult role model. Though some of these students struggle academically, this is not simply a tutoring program—it is our mission that with strong positive influences in their lives, these children will learn self-confidence, trust and will be better prepared to succeed in the future!
If you want to be a Building Futures Mentor, contact Jeanine Thayer, Member Services Coordinator at 360-452-9244 ext. 103, or email her at: Building Futures YMCA