Sage Mentorship Project

The mission of the Sage Mentorship Project is to provide youth with a personal connection to mentors through academic and extracurricular activities in order to foster life skills and personal growth. The Sage Mentorship Project is a one-on-one mentorship organization created to address the major disconnect between tutoring and mentoring programs. The program is meant to build “real” connections, which with consistent time and effort by the mentors, will turn into powerful relationships. The program’s ultimate goal is to provide youth with a personal connection to mentors through academic and extracurricular activities in order to foster life skills and personal growth. Sage matches hundreds of committed UC Berkeley students to an elementary school-aged mentee each year. Our mission is to provide youth from the ten Berkeley, El Cerrito, and Oakland elementary schools we reach with a personal connection to mentors through academic and extracurricular activities in order to foster life skills and personal growth. Every semester, The Sage DeCal is offered to all mentors and is worth 1 unit. The classroom and mentoring portions of the class each run concurrently all the way through the semester, allowing the students to directly apply lessons learned in the classroom and utilize the classroom as a resource for issues that come up while mentoring. This course offers UC Berkeley students a unique opportunity to critically engage in the theory and practice of working with the youths in our community. This course will teach what it takes to be an effective mentor, tutor, and big brother or sister for their mentee. By the end of this course, students will be able to: 1. Develop the skills to forge strong personal relationships with the youths in our community 2. Think critically about the theory and practice of working with children 3. Learn and use pedagogical methods relevant to elementary age students 4. Recognize the potential legal and ethical boundaries a mentor must navigate 5. Apply team-building and leadership training to collaborate on a group project