How to be a Successful Mentor: Just Show Up

Longtime Franklin County Children Services mentor Claude Russell III says the secret to successful mentoring is simple: just show up. It’s all about being together and building a relationship. 

“Mentees just want your time,” he says. “They just want to be in your presence and see a person who cares. That is so easy to do.” 

Mr. Russell, a Toledo native and OSU alum, has been an active part of FCCS’s Simba Mentor program which just celebrated its 36th anniversary. Simba is a culturally and gender specific mentoring program for African-American boys and African-American men. 

“The love and the acceptance and the warmth that I’ve received in being a mentor has been unmatched,” said Mr. Russell, who recognizes that his life has been endlessly enriched by his longtime mentees - and now extended family - Seth (24) and Sebastian (18).

Never forgetting the impact his mentors made on him as he was growing up, Mr. Russell wanted to pay this forward when he joined the Simba program. “It’s really important to show our young people strong male role models and to be able to give them a glimpse of what they can be.” 

“So many of our young people, they only see what they’re surrounded by, and they limit themselves. They say ‘I can only become like this person; I can only do these things. There’s no other world out there.’ We’re here to show them that there are no limits and to take those limits off of themselves.”

There’s a common misconception that being a mentor is always about imparting profound words of wisdom or going off on exciting excursions, Russell notes, but that is simply not the case. 

“Some people may overthink what a mentor is and what a mentor does,” he says, thinking back about the most meaningful times he had with Seth and Sebastian were just hanging out, running errands, or jumping in the car for a spur-of-the-moment outing. 

Russell urges anyone thinking of mentoring to take the next step. “There are children who absolutely need you in their lives,” he says. “You are the person that will make the difference for them.” 

“We need our children to be with good role models and to have a safe person that they can come to. You can be that person.”

Learn more about the Simba Mentor Program - and the Malaika Mentor Program for African-American girls and African-American women - by clicking here to visit the FCCS website.

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