This week, local and national news sources (and many of my Facebook friends’ news feeds) are paying tribute to Steve Jobs and his (in my opinion) absolutely mind-blowing contributions to technology. His ideas changed how we do business, how we communicate with each other, how we live.
The mentoring field also lost a great innovator this week - Dr. Peter L. Benson, president and CEO of the Search Institute, passed away on Oct. 2 after a year long battle with cancer. Dr. Benson’s contributions to youth development are (in my opinion) absolutely mind-blowing. His ideas changed how we do our business, how we communicate with young people, how we see young people – as assets to grow and nurture, rather than problems to eliminate or fix.
In my first year at MPM, at a special board meeting, I had the chance to sit at the same conference table as Dr. Benson. Twenty years earlier, I had been a youth representative on a Healthy Communities/Healthy Youth initiative in my hometown. That initiative, spurred by Dr. Benson’s research and ideas, changed the way teachers, coaches, and mentors in my home community viewed me, and in turn, how I viewed myself. Thanks to the wealth of “asset-builders” around me, I never focused on all the “risk factors” in my life but instead somehow thrived in spite of them.
And I have passed that lesson along – to all the camp counselors, youth workers, and mentors I’ve trained over the years. And those same counselors, youth workers and mentors have passed it along as well. It’s this legacy of Dr. Benson’s that will endure long after the iPhone and iPad have been replaced.
- To learn more about the work on Dr. Benson and the Search Institute, sign up to attend, Thriving: What Do Young People Need to Flourish? at the Minnesota Mentoring Conference
- Discuss the impact of the developmental asset framework on evidence-based practice during next month’s Quality in Action webinar.
Mai-Anh Kapanke
April Riordan
Joellen Gonder Spacek
Polly Roach
