By By JOHN EBY / Dowagiac Daily News
Kalamazoo Rotary Club's 5-year-old Strive mentoring program is just the sort of community service project Marilu Franks would like to see Dowagiac Rotary Club get behind.
Franks, a former social worker, invited Jill Eldred to speak at Elks Lodge 889 Thursday noon on Strive, a national Rotary program dedicated to helping young men and women achieve academic success, attain employment and achieve financial independence.
Eldred has corporate responsibility for Borgess-Lee Memorial Hospital in Dowagiac and also is president of Borgess Visiting Nurses and Hospice, whose eight-county staffs of 280 include 50 home health care professionals.
In 1998-99, she was interim administrator of Dowagiac Nursing Home.
Eldred, a South Haven native who has been a registered nurse for more than 30 years, also spoke to Dowagiac Rotary Club last November on health care.
In 2001, the Rotary Ambassador for Kalamazoo Central High School (KCHS) and the principal began developing a Kalamazoo Strive model to meet at-risk students' needs.
The Kalamazoo Rotary board of directors supported the Kalamazoo Strive model and the decision was made to pilot the program with KCHS students and report its success to the general membership during the 2002 academic year.
The pilot program matched six Rotarians with six high school seniors who were at risk of not graduating with their class.
Students were selected based on their academic class rank and obstacles that they would need to surmount to graduate.
Students were recommended to the program by their school counselor.
The student's parents needed to agree to work cooperatively with the mentor.
Students in the program were required to fulfill: a cumulative 2.0 grade-point average (GPA); 90 percent attendance per term; and positive behavior in the school environment as documented by school personnel.
Students who successfully completed Strive requirements were eligible for a one-year grant/scholarship valued at $1,500 minus any financial aid at a Michigan community college.
The program expanded in the fall of 2003 to serve 16 students – eight juniors and eight seniors.
The idea behind enlarging the program was that Rotarian mentors felt that impacting the student in their senior year was difficult and that working with the student over a two-year period developed a better graduation success rate.
Expanding this program to include more mentors was not an issue, according to Eldred, as Rotarian mentors stepped up to the challenge willingly.
Further Strive program expansion came in the summer of 2004 when the eight students who would be seniors during the next school year attended Rotary Youth Leadership Camp to learn basic life leadership skills.
Eldred said the impact that the leadership camp had on the students was immense.
These at-risk youths blended well with academically talented and gifted students and learned to have more confidence in their abilities to succeed.
Some Strive students succeeded beyond the academically talented students and were invited to attend advanced leadership training.
One student was further selected for the college mentoring program.
Kalamazoo mentors felt that the Strive program, in combination with life leadership, influenced the students so positively that camp is now a permanent part of the Strive program.
Every Strive student attends this camp during their second year in the program.
What started out as a small pilot program grew into a successful mentoring program recognized by the community, Eldred said.
Eldred said students always compete against themselves rather than other students and can earn laptop computers as an incentive.
The mentors consider themselves "coaches" – not social workers, she said.
The 16-student program costs Kalamazoo Rotary Club $5,000 and involves breakfast meetings. "You always feed high school students," Eldred said.
In Kalamazoo they issue bus tokens to insure transportation needs are met and mentors are paired by gender, with women working with female students and men with male students.