NON-PROFIT SPOTLIGHT
It Takes a Village of Mentors
How the volunteer mentors of OHuddle are transforming the lives of at-risk students in Wayne County schools.
Sara Reith did not set out to create a nonprofit when she looked into addressing the unmet needs of at-risk students while working as a psychologist for the Wooster City Schools. Ten years later, however, she’s leading OHuddle, a nonprofit organization established in 2013 that provides mentoring services to impoverished students and students who have experienced trauma.
“We were not supposed to be as large as we are, but we’re actually now the largest one-to-one mentor organization in a single county in the state,” Reith says.
After getting the chance to talk to her about this lifechanging organization, it’s clear that Reith, OHuddle’s full-time executive director, has no regrets about OHuddle’s impact so far as it continues to help students who were likely to fall through the cracks otherwise.
Making a Difference With One-to-One Mentoring
In her previous job, Reith wanted to address a gap in public education for those students who needed additional services to succeed in school but did not qualify for extra support. They did not have a disability but were struggling. A big believer in research and data, she looked into what would help to “activate learning in students who are living in poverty and who had experienced trauma.” The top research-based intervention turned out to be mentorship.
An “aha” moment came when Reith observed three boys who rarely, if ever, smiled or showed their personality at school yet opened up to a youth pastor mentor who “held space” for them. “I started to see their potential unfurl in a way that all of the other things that I was doing—behavioral interventions and all of the other data that I was collecting—weren’t working,” Reith says.
This observation led to a principal’s openness to explore the impact that a mentorship program could have on the school. He proposed connecting the 17 children responsible for 90% of the disciplinary activities at the school with mentors for a year.
“After the end of the year, we saw that every single one of those 17 kids improved academically and behaviorally and actually came to school more,” Reith says.
Since its inception, by focusing on the benefits of providing one-to-one mentoring on a consistent basis, OHuddle has served over 1,000 students, all in Wayne County. The mentorships are made possible by volunteers willing to donate at least one year of their time (usually longer), site coordinators, more than 100 community partners, and very willing school administrators who also see the benefits of the program in the form of lower absentee rates and fewer disciplinary actions.
What started as an experiment keeps growing. “It was not supposed to be this big thing, but it just kept working,” Reith says.
Consider the statistics gathered for OHuddle’s 2023 annual report:
How OHuddle Works
From Hummel’s conversation with Reith, we took note that the success of the program is largely due to how it’s structured. The mentorship starts early on, usually around fifth grade, and progresses as long as the child is still in school up until graduation. By starting early, there is no stigma involved, and the program is “normalized,” Reith says, because the school has multiple participants in the* program.
Volunteers undergo orientation and are expected to commit to at least one school year and 89% of mentors return for a second, third, or fourth year of service right now, according to Reith. An OHuddle site coordinator helps to properly match the mentor with the student and prepare them with 40 development assets, a research-based set of principles for helping students grow.
All meetups take place in public and follow the “rule of three” for safety reasons (i.e., the site coordinator is also in attendance). Mentors usually visit the same time every week during a non-academic time slot during school hours. Otherwise, Reith says, family obligations or transportation issues would make scheduling difficult and prevent the program from providing consistent mentoring.
“We use their spark to drive what they want to do,” Reith says about the adaptable program.
Why OHuddle Works
Reith shared with us that under Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, humans need the basics (food, clothing, and shelter) before they can form relationships, and they need to have relationships before they can achieve higher-level thinking. Unfortunately, some students are not able to acquire the basics, and they may feel shame or shyness about asking for food or new shoes. A struggling middle schooler, for example, may claim to wear a particular sweatshirt every day because it’s a favorite and not because it’s the only one they own.
“When you’re in relationship with kids and you really drill down into what their experience is and they start to trust you, then you start to get to what the basic needs are through that relationship,” Reith says.
The session usually centers around a developmental asset and an optional project. For instance, the mentor and student may choose a book to read together, or the student may opt to play Uno or basketball. Field trips are another option, as mentors and mentees have gone on fish trips, visited arcades, and more. “We use their spark to drive what they want to do,” Reith says about the adaptable program.
OHuddle receives 28% of its funding from schools, 22% from corporate donors, 23% from grants, and the rest from fundraisers, churches, individual donors, and foundations. It also has an incubator partnership to help school districts outside Wayne County learn how to launch and sustain their own mentorship programs. With 135 children on its wait list, there’s high demand; OHuddle mostly needs mentors, who are challenging to recruit in rural areas.
“[Volunteering with OHuddle is] not about fixing broken kids,” Reith says. “It’s not about figuring out what’s wrong and how can I come in and be the savior of it. It is holding space in an unconditional regard kind of way.”
Read the full Summer 2024 newsletter here.
