Generational Youth Mentors
The Generational Youth Mentors (GYM) Program was created during the COVID-19 pandemic amid school closures to give middle school students academic and social-emotional support.
The GYM program was generated as a result of a collaborative initiative between Social Creatures, the Charles Lazarus Children's Abilities Center of Mount Sinai, and STEAMPark providing K-8 learners with virtually-immersive, one-on-one academic mentoring from a supportive high school or college student.
The program was speedily initiated in April 2020, in the wake of the pandemic, to provide young learners with equitable access to academic and social-emotional support. In a time of unprecedented reliance upon technology for educational instruction, the GYM Program leveraged the opportunities brought by communication technologies to provide all individuals with equal opportunities to learn. To this end, we partnered with The Family Room to create a virtually-immersive, video-embedded academic mentoring space that was designed with the lived realities of vulnerable populations in mind. Our innovative and flexible approach to learning involves digitized multimedia materials, designed to reach diverse learners, regardless of their ability, disability, gender, socioeconomic status, or cultural and linguistic background. Delivered through a cross-age peer mentoring framework, our program aims to promote children’s academic self-esteem and growth through social connectedness with a like-minded student role model, harnessing the power of relationships to combat COVID-related socialization and learning loss.
Thurs far, the GYM program has registered a total of 43 middle school students and 37 high school mentors, and administered 255 mentoring sessions.
