About Greenville Mentoring Collaborative
By cultivating a thriving state of mentoring in Greenville County, we will create a better future for youth and for our community as a whole.
Our Mission
Our Vision
Our Strategic Direction
Advocacy
Build awareness of the current state of youth mentoring and the return on investing in formal youth mentoring.
Capacity Building
Secure resources to increase the capacity of partners to provide high quality, accessible mentoring programs.
Mentor Recruitment
Support the efforts of partners to recruit, train and support mentors.
Discover Our History
Filling gaps in community capacity through collaboration & service
Discover Our History
Greenville Mentoring Collaborative grew out of a critical need to find mentors to serve the over 300 youth coming out of Greenville’s juvenile detention center each year. The Greenville County Juvenile Detention Facility Coordinator, Mark Calligaris, had difficulty finding organizations who were mentoring youth and more specifically organizations that were willing to mentor incarcerated youth. Barriers included limited program enrollment periods, funding instability, and mentor attrition.
In March 2018, Mark began convening meetings with county mentoring programs to get a better understanding of available resources and to devise a plan to expand and improve mentoring efforts in Greenville. The initiative quickly generated interest and by October 2018, over 40 organizations, including Greenville County Schools, Goodwill GoodGuides, Mentor Upstate, Phoenix Center, and United Way of Greenville were devoting time, space, and resources to respond to the need for more mentors and greater support for mentoring programs.
Today the collaborative consists of over a dozen mentoring program partners, and representatives from law enforcement, social services, education, and the business sectors