So, you want to be a mentor?
If you really mean it, LINC President and CEO Janet Miles-Bartee told a recent audience at Central High School, be ready to give yourself up.
“It means being vulnerable,” she said. “It means being transparent . . . being emotionally present.”
The big room was filled with Kansas City Public Schools leaders, staff, partners, volunteers and students who had gathered for a launch party for the district’s growing mentorship program for the 2025-2026 school year.
An evening of encouraging speeches and testimony had led to Miles-Bartee’s keynote address, and she promised that, with the true commitment to mentorship from so many people in the room, including LINC Caring Communities Coordinators, they will change lives.
“Mentees become mentors,” she said. “The ripple effects strengthen our community, building up one another across generations.”
The KCPS mentoring program is priming for its biggest year yet, said KCPS Mentoring Program Coordinator Qiana McGee. The effort, which had 316 mentorship matches a year ago, is going into this school year with 520 matches made, and a wait-list of 180, with plans to grow the program even more.
“We’re going out into the neighborhoods, to businesses and churches . . .,” McGee said.
LINC is eager to help the program grow. In September, LINC’s team of Caring Communities Coordinators gathered at Manual Career and Technical Center to take the mentoring training from McGee and her team to help prepare LINC’s team to be mentors in all of the district’s elementary schools.
The training asked the potential mentors, What is your impact? What will your impact be?
The trainees built a list of words important to good mentorship, including “Intentional.” “Present.” “Stable.” “Purposeful.” “Listening.” “Consistent.” “Available.”
It takes “emotional intelligence,” McGee told them, “to be able to meet the student where they are at.”
It requires true empathy.
That means seeing time together as “sacred space.” A mentor can earn trust and grow together with their mentee if they can listen deeply, take in the feelings that are shared, not be so pitched toward giving advice, sometimes just say, “I don’t know what to say, but I’m glad you told me.”
At the Central High School launch event, Miles-Bartee noted that LINC’s enthusiasm for the mentoring program was bolstered by LINC’s experience over the summer when LINC brought in 10 students as interns.
The interns got to work at the frontline of LINC’s work with members of the administrative team. And they had the comfort to raise innovative ideas.
“Those students walked in ready to work,” she said. “We not only helped them, they helped LINC.”
“Mentoring recognizes that success does not happen in a vacuum,” she said. “It acknowledges the power of community.”
