Press release from Journeymen Asheville:
Journeymen Asheville is the recipient of a five thousand dollar grant from the Community Foundation of Western North Carolina’s Biltmore Lake Charitable Fund. The funds will be used to initiate and manage a mentoring group for 8th grade boys at Enka Middle School for the 2019/20 and 2020/21 school years.
“The interest in and demand for mentoring among teenage boys has been increasing dramatically over the past year,” says Journeymen director, Jordan Foltz, “and with the ability to offer our group mentoring in the schools themselves, we meet boys on their own turf and relieve busy parents of the need to transport their young men to a remote location.”
Journeymen first started its school-based programming in 2017, offering mentoring services at Erwin Middle as a partner in United Way of Asheville-Buncombe’s Middle School Success network. The expansion of services to students at Enka Middle is one of the first successes in implementing the organization’s strategic plan to make mentoring more accessible to adolescent boys in the coming 3 years.
The Biltmore Lake Charitable Fund (BLCF) was created to improve the quality of life in the Enka-Candler community by supporting education, economic development, health care and community development projects. Journeymen’s new group will focus on supporting up to ten 8th grade boys in their personal development and growth within the organization’s core values of integrity, accountability, responsibility, compassion, resilience, authenticity and self-awareness. Mentees will additionally be invited to participate as initiates in Journeymen’s Rites of Passage Adventure Weekend.
“We’re incredibly grateful for this opportunity to support young men in the Enka/Candler community. Boys today are faced with a plethora of urgent and often contradictory cultural messages of who, what and how they should be, and very often they check out completely and retreat to the digital world or apathetic resignation,” says Foltz, “Journeymen’s approach is to meet them where they are at, hear from them about what their experiences are, and to take responsibility as mentors to recognize and nurture the unique strengths in each of them.”
The new mentoring group at Enka Middle School requires the enrollment of at least 3 new mentors for the 2019/20 school year and Journeymen is actively seeking men who would like to make a lasting positive impact through mentoring. Interested men can contact Jordan at journeymenasheville@gmail.com.
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