The Cities Mentor Project: Understanding Youth Trauma

The following presentation will describe an internship experience at the Cities Mentor Project. The mission of the Cities Mentor Project is to lessen the gap of and eliminate inequality through education, specifically by connecting high-resourced universities such as DePaul with low-resourced public schools here in Chicago. The services provided by the Cities Mentor Project utilize trauma-informed therapy in order to inform the youth from low-resourced Chicago Public Schools (CPS) about chronic stressors relevant to their neighborhoods, such as poverty and violence, and teach them positive coping strategies. This trauma-informed therapy is reinforced through activities aimed at fostering stronger mentor-mentee relationships so that these youth have a positive outside adult figure that they can reach out to for social and mental support. Activities vary by day, with Wednesday being the main mentoring day where youth learn valuable concepts for coping, such as Make a Link and LetMGo, to name a couple. The remaining days of the week are community support days, where mentors and mentees are invited to engage in activities specific to that day’s theme, in order to introduce expressive forms of coping. Application information for future interns will be provided at the conclusion of the presentation.https://via.library.depaul.edu/psychologynight/1194/thumbnail.jp