MMAP Youth Mentoring

KALAMAZOO- Mediation and Motivation among Peers (MMAP) is a service-learning group of Kalamazoo College students who spend each Saturday mentoring kids at a juvenile home providing a positive, reliable, support for the young teens, most still in middle school.
Arianna Schindle, the group’s coordinator, helped to start MMAP 3 years ago when they first began mentoring at the Kalamazoo County Juvenile Home. Unlike most other service-learning programs at K-College, MMAP has no faculty advisor; the program was started and is run by students.
Alison Geist, director of the service-learning institute at Kalamazoo College attributes all the work to the student founders of the program.
Geist says they made all the connections with the juvenile center, which, “helps them to incubate their own ideas.”
The group incorporates original ideas well by creating their own goals and lesson plans each week for the juveniles.
The group mentors young inmates every Saturday for few hours. They try to consistently go to the juvenile home because many of the kids have not had much stability so it is important to have MMAP as a reliable outlet and support for them.
Ed Kamar, a youth specialist at the home, expressed the juveniles feeling towards the program when he stated, “they love it, they like the one on one.”
Kamar explained that if MMAP did not come each Saturday, the juveniles would have nothing to do but sit in their rooms for hours. Most of them hate to be in their rooms which consist of one window, a bed frame, a thin mattress, and a small pillow. It is an escape to be able to interact with the group.
Kamar also explained that this gives the juveniles an opportunity to work with people who do not have authority over them. MMAP does not have to discipline the kids, which gives them the opportunity to connect on a more personal level. The juveniles have a group of positive students who they can look at as peers, which MMAP hopes will help in their rehabilitation process.
Frank Weichlein, the director of the center, strives for community outreach to the juveniles and said, “One of the biggest benefits of our partnership with Kalamazoo College is exposing our residence with a high achieving group of students.”
Weichlein explains that K-College represents a very diverse group of students, different then who the juveniles usually interact with. He sees great value in being able to expose them to as many positive community groups as possible.
Weichlein and Schindle both emphasized the importance of the home to be an attempt at a “restorative” approach of prison compared to the “retributive” adult prison. The retributive system, punishment based, is hard on adults, but even worse for children. When basing the prison system on punishment instead of rehabilitation, few are able to change their harmful ways and stay out of the system.
The home attempts to allow juveniles to express themselves freely in a “healing circle” process which Weichlein explained, “boils down to not finding blame, but finding solutions.”
If the home were not an option for them, many would be sent to adult prison along with the many other children charged as adults in court.
Schindle, who has spent a lot of time and energy researching and trying to understand the system, suggests that housing child prisoners in the adult system has very harmful effects.
Schindle states, “At age 11 if you put them in with adults you are conditioning them.”
Instead of being nurtured at such a young age, the only role models the juveniles have are adults who have been in and out of the prison system. In turn they become repeat offenders and follow similar paths as the adults they are housed with.
Erin Mette a sophomore at Kalamazoo College, now in her second year volunteering with MMAP, says that she hears some of the juveniles in the home claiming that this just prepares them for the real thing. Because many of them have faced time in prison before, and been in and out of the juvenile home, they have already become conditioned into the mindset that this is the only life for them.
Many of the juveniles in the home come from very rocky backgrounds, suffering from undiagnosed mental health problems, and a family history of drug and alcohol abuse. Mette shared a similar opinion with the MMAP team when she said, “To what degree is a 13 or 14 year-old responsible for their mistakes?”
Mette said that most of the juveniles she has worked with have dealt with more than she ever will have to and says that mentoring has been more challenging than she expected.
“It takes a lot to teach a kid to step outside that framework” said Schindle.
After kids have been in the system it is hard to help them survive outside it. It has become too easy to just ignore the problems in the justice system and cast these young children aside.
As Weichlein claims, “They have been dealt such a rotten hand in life. It’s no wonder that they are here.”
The staff and faculty at the home want to be able to provide a positive safe environment for the juveniles. While the home is not able to change everyone for the better, many leave the home and do not return. With the help of community groups like MMAP, through their one on one work with the juveniles, they hope that many more will not return to the home.
The MMAP group has been working with quotes during their recent lessons to encourage self-esteem for the juveniles. They use common quotes from hip-hop artists and other noted speakers and writers.
One project revealed to the juveniles words from a Tupac song, stating,
“We wouldn’t ask why a rose that grew from the concrete has damaged petals, in turn we would all celebrate its tenacity, we would all love its will to reach the sun. Well, we are the roses, this is the concrete, and these are my damaged petals, don’t ask me why, thank God, and ask me how.”





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