For the 3rd year in a row, Project MALES dedicated the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. holiday as a day of service to honor his legacy. On Monday, January 19th, our mentors and work-study students kicked off mentoring activities for the spring semester with a retreat. Mentors and work-study students participated in a variety of activities. They divided into groups corresponding to their respective school sites and they engaged in several team-building activities, including icebreakers and energizer activities to help students when motivation decreases.
In addition, Project MALES mentors and work-study students participated in two personal development workshops. The first was facilitated by Paola Rabago, Coordinator of Advise Texas, a college advising corps that places recent college graduates in high school campuses. Recent graduates serve as near-peer college advisors for low-income and first-generation students leading them to college. Paola provided our students with information regarding potential career paths in education after college graduation by describing how the Advise Texas program works. The second workshop, led by Crystal Guevara, a graduate student in the Counseling Psychology Program under the Department of Educational Psychology at UT Austin was well received. She shared her work with young Latina middle school girls. Crystal engaged our students in a dialogue about what it means to be a Latina, including how to better support adolescent females in terms of developing a positive racial identity, body image and how young Latina women can be empowered to do better in school and become leaders in their communities.
Our 2015 Project MALES MLK Day retreat was a great success thanks to our mentors, work-study students, guest speakers, and mentoring staff. Stay tuned as we will be profiling our mentoring sites, mentoring events, and activities throughout the semester.
