DOWNEY - The Downey Care Collaborative is looking for volunteers to mentor fostered and homeless youth through the length of their high school tenure.

According to Victor Manalo, co-convener of the Downey Care Collaborative, the organization is looking to bring Operation Jumpstart into the city.

“Operation Jumpstart is an organization out of Long Beach, they’ve been in existence for over 25 years now,” said Manalo. “Their mission is to get students in the Long Beach Unified School District who come from under-resourced and low-resourced communities to make sure that they get into a four-year college or university.”

“They do it basically through mentoring, and by providing activities and events for the mentors as well as for the students, and they’ve been very successful.”

There have been 20 eighth grade students within Downey Unified School District who have been identified as potential candidates, which means that there are 40 mentors needed.

Mentors will be screened and interviewed before being matched with their student.

“Part of their success is they match a mentor with their student with very detailed interviews to make sure they’re a good match,” said Manalo. “Not everyone that volunteers will be matched right away, because we want to make sure they are good matches that last a while.”

While there is no financial requirement involved, mentors will be asked to make at least a one-year commitment and required to spend six to eight hours a month with their mentee.

“The way that we envision it happening is that we’ll start with the children that we have now who are in eight grade and soon to be freshmen,” said Manalo. “We want to have them in a mentoring relationship throughout high school, so that by the time they graduate high school, they’ll have a plan for what they want to do after high school.”

“Unlike what they’re doing in Long Beach, we want to make sure these kids have multiple options in front of them. Not all kids are able or willing or could even benefit out of going to a four-year university, for example. We want to make sure that in addition to four-year universities, that students know they can go to a junior college, or a community college, they could go to a trade school, they could get a job, or they could go into the military, that there are a variety of different options.

Manalo added that it is the relationship between the mentor and their pupil that is “the most important.”

“Unfortunately, many of these kids don’t have very good outcomes after they graduate high school,” said Manalo. “Nationwide, what happens is, what we usually find is about 50% - we’re just talking about kids in the foster care system – about 50% of them after they graduate high school or after they turn 18 and age out of the foster care system, half of them become homeless or incarcerated within 18 months, which is really a horrible statistic.”

 We want to change that here in Downey so that we can get youth engaged in some plan ready for them after they graduate from high school so they don’t end up being one of the 50% that is homeless or incarcerated within 18 months.”

In light of the pandemic, the hours spent with each mentor and mentee can be spent over the phone or on a video call.

For more information, email Manalo at victor@victormanalo.com