AMMY (Adults Mentoring Minority Youth)

Research has shown that a question as simple as, “How was your day at school?” when asked by a parent or an adult on a regular basis, improves a child’s performance in school and decreases the likelihood for that child to drop out of school.

Inspired by the success of our peer tutoring program, we decided to add an adult mentorship component to the Translators of Cultures organization. AMMY (Adults Mentoring Minority Youth) was born.

The AMMY program has twenty participants, both youth and adults. Our adult mentors are community volunteers who visit with  minority high school students during the students’ lunch period. In many cultures, a kind, caring adult who helps youth during their formative years is called an aunt or an uncle, regardless of whether they are a blood relative.

We seek to model this for our Translators of Cultures youth through the AMMY program. Our goal is to empower students to have better grades, improve their attendance, and to help them define their goals for the future. This small but meaningful program has demonstrated success. This is what a female student from Congo said about her mentor, Susan Froehlich, “Susan is one of the first people I think of when I need advice.” In a year of meeting for weekly lunches, this 17-year-old student considered her mentor, Susan, a close friend.Now this young woman is married and is a mother of two small children. She moved out of Sioux Falls, but they are still connected by phone conversations, at least once a week and are always well aware of each other’s lives.

Success stories like this one showcase the changes that AMMY has on the lives of young people. We believe that those are examples of dreams come true thanks to the guidance, wisdom, and love that adult mentors offer to our AMMY youth.