Changing the World Just Might Start With Baby Steps

She sat very quietly in her seat, a petite 11-year-old with long brown hair and a sweet, open face. I was drawn to her because I remember how it feels to be 11 and painfully shy.

Her name is Yanira Lemus, and she is a sixth-grader at Horace Mann Middle School in South-Central.

We met last fall, when I began following an unusual after-school mentoring program at Horace Mann, which sits five blocks west of the infamous intersection of Florence and Normandie.

About 150 students were chosen by teachers to participate in TeamWorks, which brings mentors together with students one afternoon every other week in one of those incredibly straightforward attempts to change the world, a few kids at a time.

October’s kickoff event--an assembly with two very loud musical acts--was designed to fire up the kids--which it did. The volume had adults holding their hands over their ears.

As my head vibrated from the music, it occurred to me that any effort to harness the energy of these squirming adolescents would be like trying to cap a volcano.

Could this program possibly make a difference?

With a little help, could these disadvantaged youngsters--like the ugly duckling in the old Chinese tale--become more than what was hoped for?

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Horace Mann was one of six schools chosen for the TeamWorks mentoring project this year. Like the other sites scattered across the county, it was selected for its “at-risk population.”

Three-quarters of its students qualify for free lunches under federal low-income guidelines, Principal Rose Ollie said. Close to 25% of the student body, she said, lives not with mothers or fathers but with extended or foster families.

By virtue of their age--not quite children, not quite adults--the students are in transition and ripe for mentoring relationships. Not ugly ducklings, just awkward ones.

“These kids are vulnerable,” said Jing Redfern, 28, a graduate student at Pepperdine University who served as TeamWorks coordinator for Horace Mann. “At this age, they can go one way or the other, and by the time they leave here, they usually know which way they are going.”

TeamWorks takes a unique approach to mentoring. Instead of pairing one child with one adult, it makes miniature communities, teaming a dozen or fewer students with a trio of mentors--one teacher from the school, one business professional and one college student.

Two weeks before the raucous assembly, the TeamWorks concept seemed simple and easy when it was explained at the first mentors meeting in the school library.

Teams would be charged with one major task: The students were to create and find a way to fund and execute a community service project.

“Learning that you can do for others puts your own hardships in perspective,” said Barbara Lehrner, executive director of Los Angeles Team Mentoring Inc., which runs TeamWorks out of a donated Downtown office on a budget of about $350,000 a year from private sources.

“Inner-city kids feel powerless. If they realize they can make a difference, they understand they have power.”

“It’s a challenge. At times it’s frustrating, but you’ll find that it’s worth your time,” said Nora Coes, a 58-year-old computer and graphic arts teacher who had volunteered for her third year despite a grinding daily commute from Moreno Valley.

I took an instant liking to Coes and decided to attach myself to her team. Her co-mentors were a 25-year-old Manhattan Beach investment banker and a 19-year-old El Camino College student.

The investment banker, Michael Handler, and his 33-year-old brother, Richard, a bond trader, had spent months looking for a children’s charity to work with.

“We wanted to work in an area where there are disadvantaged kids, not just because they are poor, but also because the teachers are so incredibly overloaded,” Michael Handler said. “If you sit in on one of Nora’s classes, they are like a nightmare, with like 40 kids.”

That’s what I was afraid of.

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But TeamWorks turned out to be nothing like an unruly class.

None of our team members turned out to be as introverted as Yanira, but they were a fairly tame group--with the exception of 12-year-old Joseph Henry, a young man with a dazzlingly big personality.

The fifth of eight children, Joseph sings gospel music professionally with his family. He is one of those irrepressible adolescent dervishes who spins out of control now and again.

Coes had a knack for reining him in.

After a few weeks, as attrition took its toll, our team merged with another group of slightly older, more boisterous kids.

Over the next few meetings, the students set about refining ideas for their community project. They voted to raise money by holding a carnival on campus, with games, a bake sale and root beer floats.

In lively debates about how the proceeds would be spent, the kids made a list of possibilities:

Cancer research, graffiti removal, feeding the homeless, recycling, toys or entertainment for sick chil dren, a campus mural, running errands for old folks, reading to the blind, visiting a rest home.

They decided to donate the money to blind children.

The carnival was scheduled for the middle of April. It went off without a glitch on a breezy, beautiful afternoon.

The root beer floats were a hit, which was expected. The surprise of the day was the popularity of a game in which blindfolded players tried to sift safety pins from bowls of uncooked rice with bare hands.

In little over an hour, with the cost of the ice cream and root beer “underwritten” by the Handlers, and baked goods from their own kitchens, the students raked in an astonishing $325.

Two weeks later, we gathered in the school cafeteria to present the community service projects. One team picked up trash at Venice Beach. One painted a mural on campus (“Have class, don’t trash”). Another drove to Echo Park to hand out homemade sandwiches to homeless people.

Our team presented a giant check to a representative to the Foundation for the Junior Blind. The money, she said, would allow a blind child to attend summer camp.

“This is the first time I did something like that,” said 12-year-old Harriet Thomas, a bright, motivated student who hopes to attend USC. “It surprised me to raise all that money, and it felt good to donate it to someone else.”

I felt a swelling pride in these kids, even though engaging them in meaningful conversation was still about as hard as sifting pins from rice.

I wouldn’t exactly say that Yanira, now 12, ever completely opened up. It took months of monosyllabic answers to my questions for me to finally glean that her parents emigrated from El Salvador before she was born; that her father, who was once a teacher, now works for an electronics company, and that her mother is a housekeeper.

Yanira also told me, finally and modestly, that she is a gifted student who loves math and science. She dreams of attending UCLA, of becoming a surgeon.

It is hard to know what TeamWorks will mean in the long run. Certainly for the mentors, it fulfills a certain psychic need. It gives youngsters positive messages about life’s possibilities.

And it may even be able to give someone like Yanira Lemus the confidence and strength to pursue her dreams, to transcend her circumstances, to become more than what might have been hoped for.