Retired Army General Colin L. Powell,

founding chairman of America's Promise -- The Alliance for Youth.

Retired Army General Colin L. Powell is the founding chairman of America's Promise -- The Alliance for Youth. The organization has granted us permission to reprint an excerpt, dated 10/1/98, from a dispatch he wrote on America’s Promise Web site.

"A mentor can provide a child with a safe place and constructive activities. A mentor can take a child to a doctor or dentist or clinic for a check up or health problem. A mentor can offer practical advice on the world of work. Sometimes, mentor/mentee relationships develop out of job training relationships.

Finally, mentors – simply by being mentors – can make their lives a civics lesson. Talk is cheap, and kids can spot a phony or a hypocrite a block away. But when a busy adult takes time out of his or her full schedule to care for a youth in need, that adult teaches that youngster more about the importance of giving back than a hundred sermons.

Sometimes, mentors and mentees work side by side in serving their communities...

So it is clear that if we can match a child with a caring adult, we have gone a long way toward steering that child away from trouble and towards a successful adulthood.

We know, and we have the statistics to back it up, that if a child has a mentor, that child is not only less likely to abuse drugs and alcohol, cut school, or engage in violent behavior, that same child will get better grades, get along better with other kids, and stand a better chance of finishing high school.

The extraordinary thing is that something that does so much good should cost so little. It costs about $200 to provide a Boys & Girls Club experience to a single youngster. In contrast, it costs society $25,000 a year to keep a young man or young woman locked up in prison.

So – do we spend $200 now, while an at-risk kid is still reachable – or do we spend $25,000 a year on that same child after he or she has gone too far down the wrong road in life?

For too many years we have been building jails to hold young people who have failed. They have failed because, to a great extent, we have failed them. We can’t afford to fail our kids any longer."

(For more on mentoring, please also see the Safer Child Advocacy page).

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