ASU alumna Nikki Lewis was orphaned at 14, while marketing senior Priya Nathan listened to her mother read newspaper articles about children in foster care every Sunday while she was growing up.
The two women turned their own radically different experiences into a social program. Partnered for Success provides workshops, mentoring and community service opportunities for Arizona youth in foster care.
Lewis said the programs are based on problems she faced as an orphaned child.
“At the end of the day, they are still normal 14, 15, 16-year-olds,” she said. “They face the same issues of — where do I want for school, what do I want to study, what does my future look like — but they have the added difficulty of being in the foster care system.”
Their pilot program, which starts Feb. 11, is small. Six teenagers in foster care will be paired with ASU students serving as mentors.
The full program, which will begin in August, will be with 15 children.
Lewis said the program is intentionally small because she has witnessed first-hand how large programs often fail.
“They want to be everything to everybody so they end up not being the best that they can be,” Lewis said. “They end up being huge and never really allowing the kids to be recognized as individual.”
She cited her own experience with the Orphan Foundation of America, an organization she said does “great things,” but took three years to spell her name right in emails.
Much of the program is based on small workshops and one-on-one mentoring with their college counterparts.
Marketing senior Christien Crynes will be one of the mentors for the pilot program.
Crynes met Nathan and Lewis through a leadership program with the Pat Tillman Foundation.
Crynes said he sees his mentor role as primarily being a good friend to both the teenager he’s paired with and the others in the program.
“My parents always taught me that we’ve been blessed to bless others,” Crynes said.
The same principles drew Nathan to the program. She and Lewis entered Partnered for Success in the ASU Innovation challenge and were one of the spring 2011 winners. Nathan is also competing through ASU’s Social Venture challenge.
“I was lucky to have both my parents and a loving supporting family, but not everybody is and this seemed like a good way to even the playing field,” Nathan said.
Lewis and Nathan aim to connect the youth with existing resources more so than creating their own.
The monthly workshops include a college preparation workshop with College Depot, a financial literacy workshop with Wells Fargo and a career workshop with ASU’s career center.
The Maricopa County Office of the Legal Advocate is handpicking youth who could benefit from the program to participate in the pilot, and Crynes said they should know who these children are by Sunday.
“As a pilot, we have to set ourselves up for success just a little bit, so we’re looking for kids who can be in it and want to be in it,” Lewis said.
Reach the reporter at julia.shumway@asu.edu or follow @JMShumway on Twitter.
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