Houa Xiong, a senior at St. Paul Johnson High School, and her mentor, 3M engineer Keith Grauppman, have a great relationship that spanned a 3M internship last summer for Xiong and helped inspire her to apply to Macalester College and the University of Minnesota to study science and math.
For Grauppman, a decade-long mentor to several high school students, Xiong and the other bright kids from the East Side of St. Paul are inspiring and increase his "faith in the future."
"Some of these kids say they can't afford to go to college, or that nobody from their family has gone to college," Grauppman said the other day. "I encourage them to apply and tell them" about all the aid available to promising students, regardless of income.
Countless studies and anecdotal evidence prove that mentoring between caring, successful adults and low-income kids is a low-cost, high-return way to improve high school academic performance and motivate many of them to post-high school education by linking school to economic success.
3M mentors have done such a good job, including providing corporate support to a variety of mentoring initiatives, that the company was named the first corporate recipient of the "Excellence in Mentoring in America Award" from Mentoring Works, at its annual January conference in Washington, D.C.
More than 500 3M employees and retirees serve as mentors through the 3M/St. Paul Public School Partnership. And 3M funds a volunteer coordinator at Johnson and Harding schools, near 3M's Maplewood campus, who helps connect the teachers and students with 3M volunteers and mentors for classroom discussions, science fairs, tutoring and mentoring matches.
Joellen Gonder-Spacek, executive director of the 20-year-old Minnesota Mentoring Partnership, calls 3M a cornerstone supporter of her organization, the umbrella organization for hundreds of mentoring organizations, from schools to Big Brothers Big Sisters to Bolder Options, that can use business volunteers.
Eventually, as the economy continues to recover, employers hire and baby boomers retire, America will have a job shortage, the demographers tell us. Besides, I've never met a mentor who did not say he or she got more than they gave from the relationship. More information: www.mpmn.org.
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