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Meet Tony LoRe of Youth Mentoring Connection in South LA

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Today we’d like to introduce you to Tony LoRe.

Tony, please share your story with us. How did you get to where you are today?
Youth Mentoring Connection (YMC) was founded in 2001 by Tony LoRe. Originally a successful businessman, Tony found his life’s passion in working with young people. Tony answered that calling and sold his business to dedicate his life to helping kids and transforming culture. He now spends all of his time and energy dedicated to connecting youth with mentors in their community, leading healing processes like Medicine Wheel Ceremonies, deep healing circles and Initiatory Rites of Passage Retreats. LoRe started as a volunteer, writing Life Skills and Business Skills curriculum for the Universal Youth Entrepreneur Academy and the Center for Entrepreneurism at Manual Arts High School. He served the leadership role in curriculum development for the Community for Education Foundation’s entrepreneurism program, creating the model for facilitation of student sessions and teacher training.

In addition to his duties as CEO of Youth Mentoring Connection, he designs and runs all of its programs, serves as a mentor for the mentors, counsels youth, and collaborates with other non-profit organizations. Tony LoRe’s decision to dedicate his life to finding mentors for at-risk, inner-city youth has impacted the lives of thousands of kids and just as many adults, but he will tell you that the life saved was his own. Youth Mentoring Connection began as a small mentoring program serving just over 40 youth per year. The concentrated program allowed the organization to identify potential pitfalls, solidify its use of best practices in mentoring and to ensure that the program was providing the optimum support necessary in its one-on-one mentoring relationships before expanding the reach of its programs. The growth of the organization attests to the results achieved.

Youth Mentoring Connection’s programs and services have since benefited over 6000 youth through direct mentoring, collaborations with other organizations and through mentor training provided to organizations throughout Southern California. In addition, Tony’s mentoring model, developed for YMC, is now replicated in all right provinces of Peru and is being rolled out as the model for Singapore’s National Mentoring Movement, which Tony helped launch in January 2019 and continues to collaborate and train. A team from Mendaki Singapore is presently in Los Angeles training with Tony and YMC. From the YMC website: WE SHOULD TALK ABOUT THIS PROBLEM There is a Beautiful Creature Living in a hole you have dug. So at night, I set fruit and grains And little pots of wine and milk Beside your soft earthen mounds, And I often sing.

But still, my dear, You do not come out. I have fallen in love with Someone Who hides inside you. We should talk about this problem- Otherwise, I will never leave you alone. by Hafiz This poem by Hafiz has a beautiful line: “I have fallen in love with someone who hides inside you.” It expresses the essence of the work we do at the Youth Mentoring Connection. We realize that hiding inside every confused, angry, shy, sad or braggadocios child is a gifted soul that came into this world to contribute from their genius. When a mentor comes into the life of a young person, they are affirming that something beautiful is hiding inside of that child.

In fact, the poem describes the process of mentoring for at-risk youth. It is a process of consistently showing up and offering sustenance in the way of caring, listening, deep conversation and guidance to help young people to begin to climb out of some of the holes they have dug. This requires the ability to “see” beyond their behaviors and attitudes and into the goodness that we all possess. In our efforts to help keep the spirit of “seeing” alive we have adopted a Zulu word as our customary greeting whenever we get together in a program. The word is “sawubona” and it means “I see you.” It speaks to the necessity in each of us to have our gifts affirmed and to know that we are valued, by each other and by our community.

In a similar way, our supporters and key stakeholders let us know that they value the sacred work that we do. They are saying to Youth Mentoring Connection “We see you.” We “see” the lifted spirits of youth because you create the space where that can happen. We “see” the passion, dedication and self-sacrifice on the part of your staff to try to make this world a better place. We “see” the need for us all to join in this effort to give hope to kids and to support their dreams, indeed to help them believe they can have dreams. We appreciate that you are reintroducing the concept of elders that bring the accumulated wisdom of their fulfilled dreams so that youth can learn and be inspired.

Overall, has it been relatively smooth? If not, what were some of the struggles along the way?
Not possible to be a smooth road and do this work authentically. Dealing with the inequities of our culture and the legacy of racism and the suffering of poverty is not easy. Visiting kids in lock-up, dealing with all of the perils of life in the hood, including violence, gangs, drugs, dropouts, teen pregnancy is not a smooth road. We have buried youth, visited them in lock-up, held peace meetings in backyards in the hood, invited enemies to the mountain retreats together, to mentoring program sessions together, to surf together, etc. We have stayed up all night with suicidal youth and dealt with almost every kind of breakdown you can imagine. Yet, the resiliency of the human spirit is such a beautiful thing to witness and the strength of young people who continue to get through these trials and rise up again and again, heal their wounds and discover their gifts (finding purpose in the pain) is the privilege of a lifetime, a lesson for us all and we wouldn’t trade it for a smooth ride.

Also, keeping a non-profit funded is always a challenge and there have been times that took a great deal of creativity and sacrifice to keep the doors open. Tony consistently volunteers to go without a salary and key staff has worked for reduced pay because we all believe that this work is vital. from Tony: There was a time that I was trying to decide whether to keep the doors open or close up shop. I will do this work for the rest of my life but wondered if the universe was telling me to do it in another form. Then we had a session we call Echo, a monthly gathering where mentors and youth come together to share their stories, uncovering wounds and discovering gifts. This session was just after the Trump inauguration and ICE was conducting raids in some of the Latino communities that we serve.

A youth stood up in tears to share of his experience watching his neighbors being rounded up in zip-tie handcuffs, while his parents were hiding in the back room hoping the knock wouldn’t come on their door. Another youth got up and asked what we all thought it was like to have your mother give you instructions every morning about what to do if she doesn’t come home. Then a black kid on the other side of the room stood up and pointed to me and said, “I vouch for him!” He will be here for us no matter what. ‘I haven’t gone through what you are, but I’ve gone through my own kind of hell… And when I feel like I can’t take another step, I take enough steps to get to YMC because they will always be here for us.” Well, I realized that I had to do whatever it takes to keep this thing going. Spent the next 6 months in manic fundraising mode and several angels from our community came through with enough to keep us going. We are now on solid ground and, while not swimming in funding (yet), are getting stronger every day.

We’d love to hear more about your organization.
We are a 501c3 nonprofit youth-serving organization, specializing in mentoring and healing for young people We have developed a model for mentoring youth that is unique and record-breaking in its results. Working over the years with neighborhoods where graduation rates were as low as 27% and schools reporting in the 45 to 50% range, we have consistently achieved 93+% graduation working with the youth identified as the ones who wouldn’t graduate. This is just one of many metrics that we keep. Our results consistently outperform all national statistics on results of mentoring and other youth programming. Our uniqueness lies in our dedication (amazing staff) as well as our innovative approach. Most youth work is done with eight words “if you do this, then you get that”. It’s good that young people know the bad and good consequences of their behavior, but that doesn’t provide healing or transformation.

Our methodology (which has been introduced to over 30 countries) is called “The Gift Centered Approach (TM)” Simply put, every youth comes into this world with gifts and a unique purpose in life. Our job is to help them see this, to feel valued and supported and to reawaken their dreams. In fact, we have discovered that it’s often easier to see the gift when they are ‘misbehaving’. A disruptive youth may be a leader. A tagger may be an artist. etc. We also know that a very high percentage of our youth suffer from PTSD. So, the deeper level of mentoring understands that one’s gifts lie next to one’s wounds. We help our young people open up about the ‘woundings’ that are holding them back in life, find healing in our community setting, get whatever professional help they need and then step into a thriving life of offering their gifts to the world. Our programming has five key elements: The Gift Centered Approach (TM) Instant Community Initiation/Rites of Passage Innovative Mentoring Creative Expression We use indigenous inspired rituals, ancient stories, poetry and music to create a space for deep conversation that heals, YMC explores the deeper wounds of the soul in community with others who are there to listen, witness and in turn, tell their story.

Let’s touch on your thoughts about our city – what do you like the most and least?
Best: all of its forms of diversity. I love the different rich cultural heritages of our youth and mentors. I love the ocean (I’m a surfer), I love the creativity and innovation, openness to new ideas and paradigms, the weather, the arts, the youth Least: homelessness and other inequities. There is a lot of superficialities, traffic of course.

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