Sarah Hemminger
Age
30
Social entrepreneur, co-founder/CEO of the Incentive Mentoring Program Education BS and PhD in biomedical engineering, Johns Hopkins University Home Eldersburg Profession
Back in 2004, Sarah Hemminger was stopped at a traffic light near Johns Hopkins Hospital when she had an epiphany about Baltimore. “It was like I just saw for the first time the reality of things,” recalls Hemminger, an Indiana native who was then a doctoral candidate at Johns Hopkins medical school. “The Section 8 housing on one side of the street, and then these beautiful Hopkins buildings that were going up right in front of my eyes. I had a realization of not just the need, but also the possibilities.” Soon after, Hemminger and her husband, Ryan, launched the Incentive Mentoring Program (IMP). The nonprofit aims to improve the overall wellbeing of at-risk inner city teens who are grappling with challenges that range from abuse and neglect to gang violence, drugs, and poverty. IMP’s model is innovative because it links the youngsters to a “family” of mentors who are completely committed to that one student during high school and beyond. 38 march 2011 www.urbanitebaltimore.com
“We have a totally different view of what mentoring is,” says Hemminger. “In our program, everyone—including the student—is a mentor, and everyone is also a mentee. Everyone is there to learn and to grow. Everyone has something valuable to contribute.” IMP works with students from Dunbar High School in East Baltimore and the Academy for College and Career Exploration in Hampden. Hemminger and her team of three paid staffers identify high school freshmen who are failing the bulk of their classes and are chronically absent. The students are screened and interviewed before being assigned “families” of eight to ten mentors. The students and their mentor families become close. They often meet over meals (pizza’s a favorite), and the mood is generally upbeat. Still, the reality is that this process can also be tough. “There are huge peaks and valleys with all of the kids— and the mentors too,” Hemminger says. “These kids have developed certain habits over a lifetime, so they don’t just go away.” Take the young man who vehemently resisted efforts to get him to attend school regularly. “One of his mentors drove him there and dropped him off,” Hemminger recalls. “He left and went back home. His ride came back and dropped him off again. He left again. This continued for a while, until he realized we were not going to give up on him.” IMP mentors work with students until they graduate from high school and at least four years afterwards. This unconventional, long-term “family” approach has yielded dramatic results: To date, 94 percent of IMP students have graduated from high school and matriculated to college. That success has won Hemminger and IMP praise in the community and various honors, including fellowships with the global nonprofit Echoing Green and the Open Society Institute-Baltimore and funding from Hopkins and the Lockhart Vaughan and Abell foundations. Last year, IMP launched a summer institute in partnership with Johns Hopkins University that invites the teens to Hopkins’ medical campus during the summer months to receive tutoring and learn about such topics as nutrition and free speech. They also have paid jobs helping in university laboratories. “They’re earning their own money, which gives them a sense of pride and value,” says Daniel Hiroyuki Teraguchi, assistant dean for student affairs at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and director of its office for student diversity. “It seems to transform how they see the world.” Pamela King, director of Community Fellowships and Initiatives for OSI-Baltimore, believes IMP has the potential to be taken national. “The cool thing is that they are constantly fine-tuning and re-visiting their model,” King says. “None of this is an easy fix. But they are helping to empower young people who are out of the mainstream to learn to fix their own problems. I think [their] work is essential.” Essential, yes, and incredibly difficult. But Hemminger has never given up on any kid in IMP. “By definition, if we’re really a family, families don’t give up on people,” she says. “Family is for life, regardless of what challenges we face.” —D.O.