Stories and Engagements

Our 2023 Wrapped
Finding Gratitude in 2023 

As we reflect on prior years, we realize that life is a roller coaster of ups and downs, and while some may find ourselves untouched by adversity, the absence of hardship in our own narrative doesn't diminish its existence. Oftentimes, all it takes is a helping hand to pull someone out of times of hardship.

Mentor-Connect strives to be that helping hand and we began our journey as a group of students who wanted to help other students from underrepresented schools, and we challenged ourselves to look for meaningful ways to help our community.  We have been working throughout 2023, through our Classroom Connect and Student Connect programs, to facilitate initiatives where students help other students by digitizing textbooks and other chapter books that will help students to read and listen to textbook translated to English online. Today, thousands of students from over a dozen schools in rural and metropolitan cities in India are using the digitized textbooks that we have provided. 

For many students across the world, English is still a foreign language and Mentor-Connect holds weekly virtual sessions, through our Student Connect initiative, for elementary and middle school students from Brazil to practice reading and speaking conversational English.

Finally, we are grateful to have the chance to volunteer at the local Angel House Soup kitchen through the holiday season, where we helped pack and serve hot breakfast and lunches for those in need.  We found the streets along the corridors of Cesar Chavez congested with traffic and the city’s growing homeless encampments. Here, that adversity is apparent, with hundreds of people standing in line to collect hot breakfast and lunches that we had prepared earlier that morning.  This experience certainly helped remind us that hardship exists and can rear its ugly head at any point.

Mentor-Connect is not just a collection of individual entities but a part of an extensive network, each contributing uniquely toward a shared cause.  To our team in Mentor-Connect, finding gratitude in 2023 means to give back instead of merely being thankful for all we’ve got and as our journey goes on, we continue to find gratitude in serving our community with purpose and along the way make friendships with some amazing people we meet.  We are very excited for what we have in store for 2024 as we kick off the year partnering with Ladders for Leaders University in their educational webinar series, which helps high schoolers prepare for jobs.