For my senior year, I completed an internship in the program Radical Possibilities through La Plata Youth Services. Radical Possibilities is a program partnered with La Plata Youth Services that takes troubled youth within the community and pairs them with mentors. This program is an intensive therapeutic intervention for youth ages 7 to 11 that face extreme adversity and hardship. It is meant to improve truancy within school, reduce delinquency, and help the students to develop resilience, empowerment, self-esteem, and social skills, all within the support of mental health professionals.
The 1:1 relationship between mentor and student is a therapeutic mentorship that aims to build the students relational skills, build rapport and trust between the student and the mentor, and to create a healthy relationship that encourages the student, helps them to grow and handle adversity, and essentially successfully intervenes in their lives therapeutically. The goal of the mentorship is to help the students to establish a healthy support system, grow in their personal strengths, and to integrate them into a healthy community.
The mentors, ranging from high school seniors to college graduates, attended weekly trainings led by a psychotherapist on topics such as trauma informed care, motivational interviewing, and mandated reporting. Each mentor also had weekly individual supervision with a program facilitator and regular meetings with their student’s case manager. Each week, all students, mentors, and program facilitators met for a group dinner where a healthy community was developed and we completed bonding and strengthening group activities. Throughout the week, mentors and students were required to meet with each other according to their own schedules in order to have individual time together. The whole Radical Possibilities program is in place to help youth at risk within the community using therapeutic mentorship, group support, and mental health training.
My Internship
In this program, I was a mentor but didn’t receive my student until several months into the program. This was due to paperwork issues and getting the student and parents involved in the program. However, for the first several months I received training on important topics and really worked on establishing myself with the other mentors and being involved in the group dinners.
As soon as the paperwork was finished, I started meeting with my student weekly. After around a month, they started attending the group dinners as well. We progressively built a healthy relationship and I learned through experience how to mentor and provide an example of a healthy relationship that had a beginning/getting to know each other phase, rupture and repair, and a healthy closure/goodbye. Throughout our relationship, my student also had improvement in their social anxiety and came out of it with more confidence and self-esteem. For my project, I worked together with my student and we designed/created a graphic novel together. We designed characters, the plotline, and started to piece together scenes and a rough draft before the program was over. Overall, it was a wonderful bonding experience for us and a way to work towards a goal. My student was amazingly creative and expressed themself through artwork. Throughout the program, I saw their artistic ability flourish and really help to shape and reflect who they were as a person. Knowing this, this project was extremely positive because although we didn’t finish the graphic novel, it helped my student to work towards a goal, develop their creativity more, and have their work supported and encouraged.
Reflection
Throughout this program, I have found many strengths in myself that I didn’t know I had. I have learned through working with my student, with the group, and with my supervisor that I’m really good at connecting with people, being authentic, empathetic, and reading situations and people. In the beginning of the program, I had to make a lot of new relationships, whether it be with my student or with other students and mentors. In doing so, I realized that I work very hard to connect with people on our similarities and to help people feel comfortable, especially in a group context. Also in order to connect with people, it was very necessary to be authentic as well. One of the most difficult things that I had to learn but also grew strong in was showing up as myself and being open, honest, and transparent. In working with my student, I strove to be empathetic and understanding of different situations that occurred within their life. On the other hand, I actually learned the most about my student’s strengths. My student may be the most perspective-understanding, empathetic, and kind people that I’ve ever met. No matter what, they strove to understand the perspectives and opinions of others, even if they didn’t agree with them. They were empathetic to the journey of each person and understanding of all backgrounds, which was an absolutely beautiful thing that I learned from.
In the program I believe that I helped to foster my student’s confidence in this by really affirming them in who they were as a person. I used a strengths-based approach to encourage them to truly embrace and recognize their kind nature, and I believe that by the end of the program I helped to change their self confidence. I consider that to be a huge accomplishment, and one that I definitely didn’t do on my own.
I’ve been faced with many challenges as well. On a group level, other students and mentors within the program made it difficult for the group dinners to be cohesive or to have a healthy atmosphere. During these times, I dealt with this by trying my best to come with a positive attitude and be as supportive as possible to the group and other students and mentors.No matter what happens, sometimes the only thing you can do is show up as your best self to try and make a difference.
In terms of me and my student, I was challenged by my ability to communicate directly and put things out there in a way that might make me vulnerable. This challenge definitely turned into a growth edge for me. Around half-way through the program, I realized that I wanted to have a deeper and more impactful relationship with my student than just getting along. In order to do this, I learned that one of the most effective tools is to communicate directly. If I was wondering how my student was doing on an emotional level, I would try somehow to guess at how they were feeling or ask questions that would reveal it to me. However, I learned that sometimes you just have to go out and ask, “How have you been emotionally?” Being direct has a higher risk, like a risk of the student closing off or feeling awkward, but it also has a higher reward. For me, being direct really helped to deepen my student’s and I’s relationship. I have learned so much from this internship. I’ve learned things about myself that I never would have known as well as things about human nature. But one of the most positive and affirming things that this program has done for me is reveal my passion and love for this kind of work. I’ve always been interested in therapy and healing, and in my Junior year I completed a similar internship during LINK working with equine therapy. However in this internship I realized that I can’t see a life where I’m not helping someone in someway. For me, giving to the world and making it a better place is what gives me purpose, and there is no better way to do that than by loving people and helping them to find their own personal strength and meaning. Throughout this last semester I’ve decided that I’m most likely going to get an undergraduate degree in psychology and a masters in counselling or an experiential therapy of some sorts. I know for a fact that I want to work in this field in some way, and this internship has been key in revealing that to me.