European Network of
Children and Youth Mentoring Organisations
Réseau Européen des
Organisations de Parrainage d’Enfants et de Jeunes
Europäisches Netzwerk von Kinder-
und Jugendpatenschaftsorganisationen
tel : +33 1 30614734 (France),
fax : +33 1 30619965
By Randolf Gränzer, ENCYMO coordinator
Presented at the NMN annual conference May 15,
2003 in Manchester, UK
When I was running through the program and the
list of participants of this conference I was more than impressed. In mentoring
terms I seemed to be coming from another planet. Why do we have so much less
mentoring on the continent? A lot of factors must have contributed. They could be
summerised by different historical background and culture. This results in
different mentalities and different institutional approaches to social
problems. You can not speed up mentoring by government decrees, as opposed to
improving professional social services. But what we all can do is improve the
environment for mentoring and find new
cultivating methods for mentoring.
That reminds me of a Chinese story. Yu Dehui, a
chinese peasant on a nice spring day noticed that his neighbour’s rice had
grown much higher than his own. He had not noticed that the neighbour had
planted the rice much earlier than he did. Suddenly Yu Dehui had an idea. The
following night he went out to his field and started pulling just a little bit
on each of his rice plants. The next morning when he went to see the success of
his action, what a terrible deception. All his rice plants had died.
Mentoring is a growth process. You can not order it by government decree, like you do with public
social services. But you can foster it and enhance it with new cultivating
methods.
And international contacts and cooperation can
be very helpful in working towards
that. This is basically my message
of today.
What if we, in continental Europe, do not need
so much mentoring? Maybe structural changes in society of continental Europe
are less dramatic than in the UK, or maybe the state run social care systems on
the continent are so much better than
in the UK.
Just two remarks. Dramatic social changes have
taken place in all of Europe, but particularly in the cities. The dividing line
is not between the UK and the continent but between Northern Europe and
Southern Europe. Indeed, the share of urban population in Southern Europe is
less than in Northern Europe. That is one reason why the south of Europe is
still more of a traditional society. The need for mentoring may be there, but
it is less visible and less admitted. Another reason is the different roles the
catholic and protestant churches have played in past when it comes to social
affairs.
As far as comparative quality of state run
social welfare systems in Europe is concerned, a score of statistics could be quoted in favour or against any kind
of hypothesis. But that would miss the point.
Mentoring is not a replacement of state run services. A mentor is
neither a competition for nor a replacement of a professional social worker. The
mentor is a supplementary offer. That kind of misundertanding is probably still
more prevailing on the continent than in the UK. Members of certain state run
social welfare systems on the continent are particularly resistent to any
change in thinking.
So much for my thoughts on the way to
Manchester. Now, what is ENCYMO? ENCYMO
is an initiative of a private individual which happens to be me. It is an
informal network of some 100 organisations and projects in Europe. They run
local mentoring projects for children and/or young people. 80 of them only
operate in one region of their country, the other twenty have local affiliates
in various parts of their country. The UK is covered as well but incompletely.
The network has no legal status, no budget and no membership fee.
Who runs ENCYMO and how?
I am the only staff member and I work for free.
Maybe I should explain in a few words what brought me to that initiative. I am
of German nationality, having lived the first part of my live in Germany and
the second part in France. My professional live in an international
governmental organisation in Paris was dealing with international economic
issues. Now comes the answer to the question.
I became a mentor 13 years ago when my own
children had grown up and had left the house.
I started as a spontaneous mentor by coincident, not even knowing the
name of mentoring and even less so that mentoring was organised by
organisations. I ended up as a registered mentor because French law obliged me
to. When I was told to register with a mentoring organisation in France, I was
appalled. That was an intrusion into my private life. I objected. But
eventually I understood the problem and accepted. Then, during my frequent
professional travel I became curious to find out about mentoring in other countries.
And, it probably is no surprise to you, the natinal organisation to discover
was Big Brother/Big Sister of America. But when I searched for mentoring
organisations elsewhere I soon realised, that the American model is not the
only one possible.
Around the time of my retirement three years
ago I created the network in the hope that it would enhance more contacts
between the organisations concerned and that through a website with all the contact details of the members
it also would contribute to find additional mentor candidates across Europe.
The result is like in the Chinese story. The thing grows, but it needs
patience.
My job consists in
a) developping and managing the free website
b) organising occasional european conferences for member organisations and
others interested in promoting mentoring in Europe. These conferences take
place whenever we find a sponsor who can help financing the expensive equipment
for simultaneous interpretation. The next one will be on June 13-15 of this
year in Wismar, Germany.
c) Delivering lectures and speaches on mentoring to whoever wants to hear
them as long as I can fit it into my schedule.
Definition of mentoring in ENCYMO
Which projects should be included in the
network and which not? We have not made a formal decision and we may never do
so. We still discover new cases which
have to be decided upon in a pragmatic manner. I believe that the National
Mentoring Network is also following a pragmatic approach. Here are a few
characteristics which have emerged so far for our network: Mentees should not
be older than 25 years. They should be in a one-to-one regular relationship
with the mentor, and it should be more than a crisis management.
Historical developments of
mentoring in continental Europe.
We
observe two categories of countries. Those in which a mentoring program was set
up on a national level and with some sort of nationwide financial support. In
the other group of countries mentoring programs developped purely thanks to
local initiatives and to local financing.
Top down
The
first group includes Austria, Denmark, Italy, Poland, the Czech Republic and a
few others in the former Eastern Bloc. In Austria the Family Association of the
Catholic Church launched several local projects in different parts of the
country. In Denmark national help was
available thanks to the personal initiative of some highlevel personalities in
the central government.
The
Italian program is a school based program and the result of an initiative of
Ms. Cuomo, wife of a former governor of the state of New York. She was very
much involved in the US organisation Mentoring-USA and created something
similar in her home country under the name of Mentoring-Italia/USA.
In
Poland, the Czech Republic and in other East European countries help on a
national level came from abroad, from America. The success of mentoring in
these countries is due to two specific ingredients: a) money available from the
Open Society Fund of Mr. Soros, the Hungarian emigrant and Wallstreet maverick
who has financed a host of other programs with the aim to open up the East
European Societies. b) a single person who managed to sell the idea to
important people in these countries and to make them implement it with the help
of the money from Mr. Soros. That person is Ms. Dagmar McGill, long time
director for foreign relations in the head office of Big Brothers/Big Sisters
in Philadelphia and now director of Big
Brother/Big Sister International.
Bottom up
The
other group of countries includes Netherlands, Belgium, Sweden, Germany and
France. In those countries no natinal help was available, and it is hard to
tell how many local initiatives exist and how well they are doing. I am sure I
still need to discover quite a few. Let me concentrate on the two bigger countries
where the lack of national help is particularly troubling because the need for
mentoring is there and it comes from a lot of kids waiting for it.
Germany
and France differ in that Germany’s government is more decentralised than the
French one. Social services in Germany are almost exclusively in the hands of
local government. France has made great strides over the last decades to
overcome its handicap of excessive centralisation. Its social service
administration has mutated from a national monster bureaucracy into somewhat
smaller regional bureaucracies of the 95 regional units called departements.
Local governments still are not much involved.
Germany
Although
social services are decentralised, the German federal government of course has
a ministry for the Family, the Elderly,
the Young and for Women. One of their hottest policy issues is the threat of a
war between generations, triggered off by the looming financial melt down of
the state pension scheme. Already 9 years ago the ministry started financing a
project under the name ‘Dialogue between the Generations’. The activities under
this program are farmed out to a non-profit organisation with which I cooperate
very closely. Unfortunately, when I talked to the government officials they did
not yet see the marketing power of mentoring concept within the framework they
have created. It is difficult to run an
awareness campaign under the title ‘Dialogue of Genertaions’. It is much easier
to run it on the concept of mentoring, because it is more concrete. At the same
time mentoring is the most powerful symbol for the dialogue of genertaions in
general.
The good news is, that over the last few
years more than 40 local mentoring initiatives have popped up without any
national or regional concertation, simply because the need is felt everywhere
and because there are some places where one or two persons are courageous and
enthusiastic enough to try and to set up a local scheme.
I am
neither politician nor sociologist. But the recent acceleration in the
spontaneous creation of local mentoring projects in Germany may have something
to do with two factors: a) the ongoing discussion in the country about the
threat to the pension system. Indeed, most of the mentors in Germany are
elderly ladies. They are the tiny minority who makes a positive contribution to
the discussion instead of only complaining.
b) someone somewhere invented for these ladies the term “Leihoma” which
means rental granny. It became a runner in the word of mouth propaganda for
mentoring. The term is actually misleading. There is no rental contract between
mentor and the child’s family which would set a rental fee, nor is there a
return date, by which granny has to be returned. A different expression would have been more appropriate such as
godmother-granny. It sounds less horrible in German than in English. But that
is not the point. The point is, that although the name rental granny is misleading it became the buzz word for
mentoring of children and young teenagers in more than 40 different locations
in Germany. Not a single EURO was spent on a national information and awareness
campaign in favor of that word. Just imagine what could be done by a
professional marketing wizzard who would be able to maybe find an even better word and through efficient media campaigns make it a household word such
as Big Brother/Big Sister in America. Incidentally the American term would be
impossible in Germany. It has been firmly appropriated by reality TV shows.
You may
ask, if the German government is absent from the mentoring scheme, what about
large national welfare organisations which surely exist in Germany and which
contribute a lot to mentoring schemes in the UK?
Yes
these large welfare organisations exist, one run by each of the two state churches,
the catholic and the protestant church, and
quite a few non-denominational nationwide organisations. Some of the
local schemes are fully or partly financed by the local offices of nationwide
welfare organisations. The surprising thing is, that their head offices do not
know about it or do not much care about it. Otherwise they would do more about
it. You can see that the decentralisation of the public administration in
Germany has a mirror image in the way
non governmental institutions are run in that country. In addition to that the
local mentoring schemes usually receive some financial help from the local
governments.
There
is one national welfare organisation which is the exception to the rule. The
German Foundation for Children and Youth together with a private international
company have spent quite a bit of money to launch a series of about 10 local
mentoring schemes. Surprisingly, the international corporation does not used
its support in its own PR activities. Its sole motivation is to enhance
corporate citizenship and civic awareness among its own personnel. I wish their
example would be followed by others.
France
In
France some 25 years ago the
central government made a trial
experiment with mentoring of children and young people who lived in the Paris
area and were recommended by a social service worker for mentoring. The project
still operates on a fairly generous financial basis but so far is only present
in 4 of the 95 departments of France. In parallel four private initiatives were
taken in the Paris area, two of them with national ambitions and rather good
success. These private initiatives operate on shoe string budgets financed by
sympathisers and by active mentors. In the last few years some people outside
of Paris emulated the examples in Paris and created a few fairly well operating
local schemes, again working on an almost zero budget.
Three
years ago, when we had our last European conference in Paris, I suggested to
the Germans and to the French to meet among themselves from time to time in
order to exchange experience and possibly consider common actions vis-à-vis
public authorities and the media.
The
Germans have not reacted so far, but the French have. They have formed an
informal national network in the same spirit as ENCYMO. My suggestion to have a
rotating coordination did not work too well. The job is stuck presently with
one to two persons who do a great job. They actually managed to contact the
French junior minister for family affairs in the central government. She
invited the members of the whole network to several hearings and issued a
report on mentoring in France. The idea was to develop subsequently guidelines
for mentoring organisations which were not compulsory but would be considered a
best practice label similar to the one of NMN. The promise also was, that the
minister would launch a national information campaign on mentoring. But it
turned out that two weeks after all this was settled, Madame le Ministre lost
her job subsequent to parlamentary elections.
So we
are back to square one in France. It has been the third attempt by the central
government to get mentoring rolling in France. I gues we have to wait for a few
more, before anything happens.
Special mentoring varieties
Let me
say a few words on some local schemes with special features. Some of them are
not mentoring schemes in the strict
sense but they may lead in individual cases into mentoring relationships. Such
features are school work help, mentoring of families with small children,
mentoring of first time job seekers, of young offenders and mediation in
schools.
All
this probably exists in some way or other in the UK for quite some time.
But as
I said, on the continent it takes some time to develop.
Help in school work
In many
mentoring relationships help in school work becomes necessary at least from
time to time even if the scheme does not call for it. Help in school work as
such often is organised on the local level by the schools themselves or by
affiliate organisations. France seems to be the country where the need for this
is particularly strong because the school system is so rigid. A child in France
whose parents are not available or do not even speak the language has not much
of a chance to make it through the normal school program. As a result quite a
few school work helpers end up in a
long term relationship with their junior partner and become a true mentor
Small children and their
parents
I
already mentioned the surprising number of German schemes where rental grannies
run the show. They mostly deal with fairly young children and by the same token
they have to deal a lot with their parents. The latter is sometimes more
difficult than the former. But from a psychological point of view the set up is
very efficient because the child benefits in two ways a) from the mentor
directly and b) from the mentor indirectly through the positive influence she
might have on the parents.
Also in
France we have quite a strong tendency in that direction. One of the private
initiatives on a national scale targets specifically seniors as mentors.
Another more local one provides mentors specifically for young mothers. The
Danish national mentoring organisation is taking up the idea as well.
First time job seekers
Mentoring first time job seekers has been launched by
the French central government some four years ago. The French labour minister
at the time took the initiative. She used the existing 600 local information
offices for young job seekers to introduce mentoring schemes wherever possible.
A volonteer mentors is matched with a young job seeker in order to help him or
her to work through the red tape, prepare for interviews and to find additional
training courses. This way supposedly 20000 young job seekers could be placed
last year.
I have
been a fairly regular guest at a Commission Locale near my home in the Paris
area. It receives more than a 1000 visitors per year but only a few dozens are
assigned to mentors. These mentors are men and women of retirement age. Some of
them accompany their mentee for a few months only, some others for more than a
year.
The
Germans heard about the scheme and two regional labour ministries wanted to
emulate it. It was successful in the smaller of the two regions, but turned out
to be a flop in the bigger one, partly because of overly bureaucratic
procedures.
From a
government perspective mentoring job seekers is more important than mentoring
small children. The latter will not blow up the unemployment statistics in such
a the near future. From a human perspective mentoring is important at all ages,
even though one must admit that the sooner a child finds support and reliable
reference persons the more it will benefit from it for the rest of his
life.
Young offenders
I know
you have a big organisation in the UK that finds mentors for young law
offenders. All in all I have found one such scheme in Germany. Again, there may
be others but they are hard to find. Some of the toughest young offenders in
Germany are those who have come with
their families from the former Soviet Union because they had a grand or great
grand mother of German origin. These people have the right to get a German
passport. They do not speak a word of German and often have no desire to do so.
Their adolescents cling together in gangs and transgress the law more often
than not. They only can be approached by mentors of their own background. And
that is a difficult task.
Mediation in schools
The
other experiment, again from Germany, is more encouraging. It is one of those
private initiatives where a dynamic and engaged person has read an article
somewhere and decides to implement the idea in her own environment. The idea is
mediation in highschools by volonteers. A lady in Berlin has become so
successful with it, that more than 10 schools have signed on. She has found in
a very short time over 50 mediation volonteers. These volonteers settle
disputes between students that seem to be trivial for adults, but can be
devastating for the young people concerned. Some students prefer the mediator
to teachers or parents. This is not mentoring in the strict sense. But the lady
tells me that some of the volonteers have some regular clients with all kinds
of problems to discuss.
The future for mentoring in
continental Europe
How
does all this bode for the future of mentoring on the continent? The political
debate about unemployment and uncertain pensions is heating up everywhere on
the continent. Two weeks ago the first general strike since 50 years came down
on Austria. The issue was a threatening cut in pensions. Germany sees one
street demonstration after the other because the government wants to relax the
sclerotic labour market regulations. France has had a general strike yesterday.
These developments make innovations like mentoring an even more urgent
issue. It ban become a powerful symbol
for positive cooperation between generations.
We need
people who can help to replace a paralysing fear in the population with a
healthy attitude of solidarity and civic responsabililty. Great ideas have been
developed lately in academic and in some political circles. I just mention
names like the communitarians aroung professor Etzioni in Washington D.C. , or
the book on social capital by Rober Putnam under the title “Bowling Alone” or even one of the latest studies on
sustainable economic growth published by the member governments of OECD under
the title “ On the Well Being of Nations”.
These ideas come from America, but
they need to be implemented everwhere.
The
trouble is, they ideas have to be brought to the people and be packaged in the
form of concrete actions they can understand and undertake. Mentoring is one of
the most effective and, admittedly also one of the most demanding actions each
citizen can undertake to invest in social capital. In order to accelerate
mentoring on the continent we can not relay on governments. The organisations
have to get together for specific projects that will help all of them. Those
projects should be in the area of fundraising events and media coverage.
..and for all of Europe?
Is
there a need for a European wide mentoring policy or even organisation? Under
the present circumstances the answer is no. Here are the reasons:
1. The
European Commission has made it clear from its very beginning that the
principle of subsidiarity should be observed wherever possible. Each subject of
public interest should be handled on the lowest level possible or in more
positive terms “on a level as close to
the citizens as possible.” In mentoring the most important decisions are
made on the local level, even in nation wide organisations with general
guidelines.
2. As
result of that principle the European Commission only gives money in the form
of cofinancing and only to specific time limited projects and not for general
operations of non governmental bodies.
3. The
only justification for creating a legal european body on mentoring would be if
we find private donors who would be interested to give money for the promotion
of mentoring in specific countries or in all European countries. But I am
afraid we are still a long way away from that.
What
can be done now is a cross border cooperation of individual mentoring
organisations within certain projects. That has a certain chance of getting
finance from Brussels. In order to develop such projects the potential partners
have to get to know each other. Our european conferences offer an opportunity
to do that. Whoever is interested should pick up the invitation I have put out
on the table or come and talk to me.