HERO MENTOR PROGRAM
Our HERO mentorship program combines one-on-one mentorship with clinical therapy to build resilience in effort of suicide prevention!
Our HERO mentor program focuses on the future leaders of America-our children, teens, and young adults who have been abused, bullied, have endured trauma, are living with a mental illness such as depression, anxiety, PTSD, self-harm, and suicidal ideations.
Our program vision is a one-on-one mentorship program where we pair the Zachary's of the World (ZOWs) with a HERO mentor. We also combine the mentorship with one-one-one counseling services, to help the youth learn positive coping skills when they find themselves struggling.
But what if we told you that our HERO mentors would look something like the people in the pictures below?
Through our HERO mentor program, we want to help not only the youth, but also our military service-members, veterans, law enforcement, and first responders. We know that these adult populations can also be at risk of suicide, and are unlikely to reach out due to the stigma that surrounds mental illness. Our program is designed to give our HERO mentors a "protective factor." A protective factor is a condition or attribute that helps mitigate the risk of suicide; it is something that keeps someone who is living in the darkness a reason to stay alive and not end their life by suicide.
By linking a HERO with a ZOW we are giving people tools to build positive relationships, hope, and encouragement. Spending quality time together participating in enriching activities such as bowling, grabbing lunch, hiking, fishing, playing disc golf etc...they will build a relationship that will positively impact each other's lives! It's a purposeful mission for our HEROs, and a way to support a ZOW.
Our program's mission is to
Help both HERO and ZOW by offering them support
Encourage them to set attainable goals toward bettering their mental health.
Reach those goals by providing them with probono professional mental health services, and
Overcome their pain in efforts of suicide prevention.
Our efforts through our HERO mentor program are to help prevent service-member, veteran, first responder, and youth suicide. This is not "just" a mentorship program, it is a combination of mentorship and therapy to help the Zachary's of the World. We know that a HERO + ZOW= RESILIENCE
**First Responders, Servicemembers, Veterans, and Civilian mentors are encouraged to apply to become a HERO. All HERO mentor applicants must undergo and pass a criminal background check to ensure the safety of the participants of our program. All mentors are expected to take a resilience training offered by our organization in partnership with The Hope For Us Network prior to being paired with a ZOW.
All mentors must commit a minimum of 6 months to the program unless being deployed.
WHY MENTORSHIP?
→ According to the CDC,1 youth suicide is one of the three leading causes of death and is the second leading cause of death for all youth nation-wide aged 10-19 years old. Mentorship for youth is a well-studied and documented strategy that can be a life-shifting intervention at pivotal times in the development of their psychological health.
→ According to the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry2 Based on 55 studies of mentoring programs, there is a benefit of program participation for youth, with at-risk youth being most likely to benefit.
For example:
● 59 percent of mentored teenagers earn better grades
● 27 percent of mentored youth are less likely to begin using alcohol
● 52 percent of mentored youth are less likely to skip school
● Youth with mentors have an increased likelihood of going to college, better attitudes toward school, increased social and emotional development, and improved self-esteem.
The strongest program benefit of mentorship: Exhibited in 55 independent studies across diverse groups of at risk youths was a direct reduction in depressive symptoms.
1 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, www.cdc.gov/.
2 DuBois,, David, et al. “Youth Initiated Mentoring: A Meta-Analytic Study of a Hybrid Approach to Youth Mentoring.” Journal of Youth and Adolescence, vol. 50, no. 2, 2020, pp. 219–230., doi:10.1007/s10964-020-01336-5.
3 DuBois,, David, et al. “Youth Initiated Mentoring: A Meta-Analytic Study of a Hybrid Approach to Youth Mentoring.” Journal of Youth and Adolescence