American Magazine: August 2014

“These kids are used to empty promises,
so they don’t expect much,” Louchheim says.
“The first step to building trust is showing up
every week.”
D.C. native Marquis was used to being left.
His mother went to prison when he was eight,
and he bounced around the foster care system
until her release, seven years later. Marquis
was arrested for the first time at age 12 for
stealing a car; he was wrapping up a nearly
two-year stint at New Beginnings for drug
charges in 2010 when he was matched with
mentor Claire Grandison, WCL/JD ’14.
“I think we’ve been to every restaurant,
library, and museum in the city. I also call her
with my lady problems,” says Marquis, now 22,
with a gentle laugh. Grandison, who will work
at Philadelphia’s Community Legal Services
starting next year, helped Marquis with
everything from his Spanish homework to job
and college applications to apartment searches.
“She taught me how to advocate for
myself—how to properly ask for what I need—
and to be a productive, positive person,” says
Marquis, a polite young man with a charismatic
smile, who greets everyone with a hug.
Grandison is gratified to have witnessed
Marquis’s transformation from lost boy to a
mentor himself. “Despite confronting so many
obstacles, he remains a constant optimist
who never ceases to develop creative goals
to improve himself and his community. It’s
been incredibly rewarding to watch Marquis
work hard to get the jobs he wanted, continue
his education and training, and advocate on
behalf of himself and others in the juvenile
justice system.”
Today, Marquis works as a youth leader
with FREE Project, a group founded by
Mentoring Today mentees that advocates for
education and employment opportunities
for kids caught up in D.C.’s criminal justice
system. In June, he collected the Coalition
for Juvenile Justice’s prestigious Spirit of
Youth Award during the nonprofit’s annual
conference—with Grandison proudly looking
on from the audience.
“She’s not just my mentor, she’s my
friend,” Marquis says. “Anything I need, I
know she’s always going to answer my calls.
She’ll always be there—and you can’t say
that about many people.”
THE SUMMER BEFORE HER THIRD YEAR
OF LAW SCHOOL, Spain did something
unprecedented: she took time off.
She retreated to Venezuela, where she once
worked for the Carter Center, to undertake
a silent meditation and pen a business plan
for Mentoring Today. She envisioned an
organization where volunteers would serve
not only as mentors but also as legal advocates,
helping juveniles—who opt into the program—
navigate the murky reentry process.
Unlike other programs, which connect
mentors with kids after they return home,
Spain wanted to begin building relationships
with the juveniles four to six months before
their release. “There’s this really rich moment
where the kids are literally a captive audience,”
she says. “If you wait until they come home,
they quickly get sucked back into their old lives,
and you’ve lost that window of opportunity.”
Louchheim, meanwhile, took crash courses
in grant writing, website development, and
fund raising—all while studying for her last
round of finals. “I was researching things like
insurance—we couldn’t pay for it just yet, but I
knew what we needed.”
“WE WERE ESCORTED
TO WORK EVERY
DAY BY THE DRUG
DEALERS FROM D.C. , S
LARGEST OPEN-AIR
HEROIN MARKET.”
- PENELOPE SPAIN
In October 2005, a month after they sat
for the bar exam, Spain and Louchheim—who
also work as defense attorneys, representing
young, lower-level offenders in delinquency
court—got their nonprofit status. Soon after,
they found space in a warehouse near Marvin
Gaye Park in northeast D.C. Calling it an
“office” might be too generous; the converted
closet had lights and a small desk, but no heat,
air conditioning, or windows. (The space
was, however, great for fund raising. “Donors
would say, ‘We’ll give you money just to get
out of here,’” laughs Louchheim.)
“We were escorted to work every day by the
drug dealers from D.C.’s largest open-air heroin
market,” Spain recalls. Staff retreats consisted
of snacking on ice cream sandwiches and
strolling through the park. And they couldn’t
have been happier, she says.
In July 2006, the women received a
$45,000 award from D.C.’s Justice Grants
Administration. Weeks later, they made their
first seven matches inside Oak Hill. Mentoring
Today was up and running.
WHEN THEY FIRST MEET UNDER THE HARSH
LIGHTS of the New Beginnings cafeteria, the
mentees don’t tell their new mentors what
landed them under the supervision of D.C.’s
Department of Youth Rehabilitation Services
(DYRS). The details will emerge eventually, but
up to this point the youth have been defined by
their crimes: drug slinger, auto thief, disturber
of the peace. For the first time in a long time,
the kids have a clean slate. “We want them to
lead with their goals, to focus on the future,”
Louchheim says.
There are games and food—carefully
laid out on the same tables each week, as
structure and routine are important—to help
the pairs get to know one another in a relaxed,
nonthreatening environment. Though they
receive 10 hours of training, the mentors, who
are recruited every September, don’t come in
with an agenda for those first few 90-minute
sessions. “We want them to develop a level of
comfort and understanding with the mentees,”
Louchheim says. “We don’t want them to get
too deep, too fast.”
Early on, the mentors’ job is to encourage
the young offenders to take accountability
for the choices that landed them behind bars
and challenge them to imagine a life outside
the watchful, unblinking eye of the criminal
justice system. As the final months of the
juveniles’ sentences begin to tick away, the
mentors switch into advocacy mode, sitting
in on meetings with DYRS and social service
officials to hash out the terms of release and
ensure housing, education, mental health, and
employment needs are addressed. That’s where
the volunteers’ legal training comes into play.
“The academic lessons I learned in the
classroom felt incomplete without seeing their
practical effect,” says Marquis’s mentor, Claire
Grandison. “Mentoring provided a window
through which I was able to learn about the
intricacies of the juvenile and criminal justice
systems and see how they function in practice.
“Addressing issues in a piecemeal fashion is
often ineffective because housing, employment,
education, safety, and other factors are all
connected, and a deficiency in one area
threatens security in all.”
When juveniles are released from New
Beginnings, they’re assigned to one of a dozen
group homes scattered across the District for 30
to 90 days. They’re fitted with GPS monitoring
20 AMERICAN MAGAZINE AUGUST 2014