Critical mentoring work is meant to be done in community. In building connections as mentors and as a multigenerational community we can engage more deeply and with loving accountability. We must challenge a hierarchical and individualistic approach to mentoring. As adults, we don’t have all the answers for every youth, but as a community of mentors and with consistent partnership with youth, we have a collective of power. Mentoring organizations cannot and should not do this work alone. Build a network of people and organizations to provide wraparound services for young people. Alongside youth, identify areas with low or no capacity and partner with organizations that can fill that gap to strengthen connectivity and the breadth and depth of resources. When doing so, center grassroots-level justice work that is actively engaged in and responding to the communities that they work with.

Put your money where your mouth is. As organizations center the critical mentoring concept they must also ensure that there are resources to support the work at various levels of the organization. It is not enough to talk about the work, processes must be implemented and without dedicated resources, any type of equity work will fail. Budgets equal priorities so we must ensure that our budgetary line items reflect the depth of our work. Liberation work must be well funded.

For too long we have been missing an intentional focus on healing and healing justice in our work. A critical interrogation of our context makes it clear that trauma is something that many of us are navigating daily. We must center a healing justice approach to our work that focuses on radical rest, self-care, and joy. We need to think about what it means to offer more holistic programming that offers community-level access to healing and wellness services. The healing is not just for youth, it is for adults as well. We need to create norms that center a community and culture of healing. We need to be more intentional about discussing healing and wellness. We need opportunities to process intergenerationally. All the building of a new world matters very little if we all show up to that new world as traumatized and harmed as we are now.

Critical mentoring is a living praxis. As we evolve, as society evolves, as what we confront as a global society evolves, so does the work. The vision, the freedom dream for this critical mentoring work is that our young people experience the freedom we never have. The freedom dream is that we build lasting alternatives to what currently exists so that our mentoring and other forms of youth work support the healthy development of young minds and a continual progression toward true liberation for all of us.