Team Up Mentoring is a community based, nonprofit organization that exists to provide opportunities of hope for youth placed at-risk by poverty, broken families, and crumbling neighborhoods. Team Up provides these opportunities through mentoring, tutoring, and other related services with the intent of nurturing children toward spiritual, emotional, and practical success as an adult. While Team Up Mentoring is a faith based program, it is not affiliated with any particular church or denomination.

Team Up Mentoring’s vision is for all children in the community of Monroe, Georgia to succeed in all areas of their lives. To this end, Team Up’s desire is to created wrap-around services for children in Monroe who typically would not receive services. Team Up seeks to connect the child’s home, school, and other life experiences in order to best serve the individual child.

Team Up Mentoring began in March 2006 with a mentoring program for 11 children under a grant from Project Healthy Grandparents. A group of committed volunteers came together, motivated by the need in Monroe for a program that would reach out to some of the most impoverished families in the area. Since that time, Team Up Mentoring has expanded to reach many more children. We have 35 volunteers with our program as of March 2008.

Team Up’s master plan begins with taking children into the program during the early elementary years (as early as kindergarten) and fostering close, positive relationships with caring adults while teaching literacy and life skills.

As children transition into middle school, children would move into different curriculum foci, including conflict resolution skills, abstinence from drugs and alcohol, computer skills, and an increased focus on content area literacy. Children would still have a mentor.

As children make the transition to high school, teens would learn how to prepared for a job interview, fill our job and college applications, and receive SAT preparation help and assistance with finding and securing scholarships for college. Teens would also have the opportunity to take part in a job-training program run through Team Up Mentoring’s other programs where teens would receive hands-on work experience and feedback on their job performance.

Presently, Team Up Mentoring runs programs for children from kindergarten age through ninth grade and holds an annual summer day camp.