A year at the South Philadelphia building.
Twelve young people. Eight months. One Wednesday afternoon at a time. What it actually looks like to run a Keystone cohort, written by the Executive Director after the 2024 to 2025 school year.
The first cohort meeting of the school year is on the second Wednesday of September. We do not call it an orientation. The young people come in already knowing the building, most of them returning from summer programs, and the rhythm of the after-school work needs to feel continuous, not introduced. The cohort sits twelve people around the long oak table by the south window, and we begin.
What we do for the first hour is the homework that any of them brought home that day. The mentors arrive at three-fifteen. Dinner goes on at five. The hour of structured activity starts at six.
I am writing this in January, four months in. I want to record what the year has actually looked like, not what we say it looks like in the annual report. The annual report is true. This is the rest of the truth.
September. The cohort is twelve again.
One returning eleventh-grader did not come back. Her family moved to West Philadelphia in August. She has joined the West building cohort, which has space for one more, and her mentor of two years is rejoining the West mentor pool to keep the pairing intact. We do this work badly when we do it bureaucratically. We did this work well in August.
Two new seventh-graders joined. Both came in through the referring middle school down the block, recommended by the school counselor, who has been recommending Keystone since 2014. Neither had been inside the building before September. By the third Wednesday of the month, both could find the dinner queue without asking.
October. The mentor onboarding cohort closed.
Four months of onboarding produced six new mentors out of fourteen applicants. The other eight self-selected out, which is the right outcome. The two-year commitment is the bar. Of the eight, three told us they could not commit to two years; three told us they wanted single-session enrichment work, which we do not run; one was screened out at background-check; one we declined for reasons we keep confidential.
The six new mentors were paired in the first week of November.
- One new mentor is a retired pediatric nurse from West Philadelphia.
- Two are second-year graduate students at Temple.
- One is a former Keystone participant from the 2008 cohort.
- One is a Philadelphia public-school teacher in her tenth year.
- One is a structural engineer who has been on our donor list since 2017.
From the November onboarding handbook. Mentors are not tutors. Mentors are not life coaches. Mentors are adults who show up at the same building on the same afternoon, every week, for two years minimum, and who notice what is happening for the young person they are paired with. The work is the noticing.
November. The thing that always happens, happened.
One of the seventh-graders stopped coming. He missed two Wednesdays in a row. Marcus called his mother. Marcus drove to their house the following Saturday morning. The seventh-grader came back the following Wednesday.
We do not advertise this. It is not a service we offer. It is what running a cohort of twelve young people looks like when you actually run a cohort of twelve young people. Most weeks nothing remarkable happens. A few weeks a year, what happens is the thing the program is for.
Marcus Crawford, Programs Director, internal note, November 2024The point of a small cohort is that you notice when one person isn’t there. The point of a two-year mentor commitment is that someone has the standing to make the call.
That is the whole architecture.
What we do not do
- We did not run an open-enrollment fall event. Continuity is the program.
- We did not take a corporate volunteer day. Mentors commit to two years.
- We did not produce a video about the work for our donor newsletter. We wrote this essay instead.
- We did not raise our cohort cap from twelve to fifteen, despite a partner’s suggestion that we could “double impact” by doing so. The cap is the program.
December. The numbers we keep.
We track three numbers each month. The first is attendance. The second is the mentor-pair touch count. The third is what we call the unprompted-talk number: how many times a young person started a conversation with staff or a mentor about something that was not assigned.
The third number is hard to measure. We do it anyway because it is closer to what the work is for than the other two.
| Number | December 2024 | December 2023 |
|---|---|---|
| Attendance (3 of 4) | 11 of 12 | 10 of 12 |
| Mentor-pair touches | 8 of 8 | 7 of 8 |
| Unprompted talks | 14 | 9 |
January. The work begins again.
The first Wednesday of January is the cohort meeting that resets the year. Junior-year college planning starts in this meeting. The summer-internship application process begins.
Outside the building it is six degrees and a sleet is falling on South Broad Street. 200
Young people enrolled across the three buildings as of the January reset.
I am writing this from the office on the second floor. Eight mentors have arrived for the four-fifteen homework session. Marcus is at the kitchen prepping the dinner. The seventh-grader who stopped coming in November is at the table working on a math worksheet.
This is the year, in the parts that the annual report does not have room for.
About this essay. Names of mentors and program directors are real. The young people referred to in the November paragraph are composites of three actual cases; they are presented as one to protect the dignity of the young people who experienced them.
South Philadelphia building 1410 South Broad Street, Philadelphia, PA 19147 Open Mon-Thu 3pm-7pm, school term Open Mon-Fri 9am-4pm, summer Cohort cap: 12 Mentor pairs: 8 active Programs Director: Marcus Crawford Building lead: Renee Thompson
Filed January 2025. Renee Thompson, Executive Director.
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