Relationships. Pure and Simple.
Our work isn't too complicated. Mentoring is about relationship development and empowerment. Students need a caring, consistent adult role model in their lives. We train, guide and support mentors to spend one hour each week with a student, for at least one school year. Most mentors choose to continue their mentorship relationship with their student after the first year as REAL mentoring starts in year two.
We have three approaches to supporting youth success
Adult volunteers provide one-to-one mentoring with students during the school day. We ask mentors to commit to one student, one hour each week, for one school year. Many mentors choose to mentor students for multiple years.
One of the best ways to support teens in our community is to empower them. Through iC.A.R.E. Connect, we train high school students to mentor younger transition aged students during the school year in small groups.
We are expanding the reach of iC.A.R.E. through partnerships with established youth-serving programs. We provide training and technical support. In exchange, the iC.A.R.E. model is reaching more students.
Jonathan & Jessica Greer, Founded the MAN-UP Movement as community engagement leaders in Akron, Ohio. They’ve worked together in imagining how to transform communities in which they’ve lived, into thriving, productive and sustainable communities. As “Family First” people, they’ve both taken different strategies but congruent approaches to expanding and developing the work of the MAN-UP Movement, which is centered around family. Jessica is a devoted wife and mother. She holds a bachelor’s degree in Family & Child Development from the University of Akron, is a homeschool educator, and founder of an all-black homeschool co-operative group. She is a creative, ambitious vegan cook and baker, selling her desserts as a private baker and caterer. Her focus is on the overall health and wellness of the family, making her own holistic natural care products, and her support is what has allowed her husband to cultivate the iC.A.R.E. Mentoring® program. Jonathan is a loving husband and father. He is the founder and executive director for the iC.A.R.E. Mentoring® program, serving Summit County students with positive, purposeful, mentoring relationships. Jonathan served as a special lecturer/part-time professor at the University of Akron’s LeBron James Family Foundation College of Education, teaching classes on Urban Mentoring. Jonathan and Jessica’s work in the community speaks for itself as they have helped to transform some of the toughest neighborhoods on Akron’s west-side from devastation to determination, providing weekly summer programs for youth, school supply giveaways and establishing an 8,000-square foot community garden space for residents in Ward 4. Jonathan has been featured in the Akron Beacon Journal, Westside Leader, Channel 19 News, SGTV (Socially Good Television), WAKR Horner’s Corner an Akron Public School’s radio and video station, TCT Television Network and the United Way of Summit & Medina County’s quarterly newsletter for various programs and services performed by him and the projects he initiated. Their non-profit organization, The MAN-UP Movement, used woodworking and mentorship to teach small groups of elementary and middle-school boys what it takes to be caring, well-rounded responsible men, which was the precursor for the iC.A.R.E. Mentoring® program.
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