A Mouse, A Moment, and the Benefits of Informed Advocacy

Jean Rhodes

I once took a year’s leave from academia to serve as a match coordinator in a Boston-based mentoring program. One evening I found myself sitting on the edge of a couch in a subsidized apartment conducting an intake with nine year old Kayla and her mom. Kayla’s toddler brother played beside me, occasionally staring at me as if wondering what this nerdy middle-aged woman was doing in his apartment. I remember feeling uneasy but also deeply impressed by the mom’s commitment to Kayla’s future–including all the hoops she was going through to enroll her in the mentoring program.

As I worked my way through the intake questions, a small mouse ran out from under the couch, crossing between my feet before scurrying out of the room. While everyone else in the room sat unfazed, I involuntarily let out a loud, embarrassing scream. We all shared a laugh before moving on, but my discomfort with the awkwardness of that moment remains. In a telling instant, my privilege had been drawn out and thrown into stark contrast with the everyday experiences of this young family. Yet as uncomfortable as we may feel entering the lives and homes of disenfranchised families, mentoring provides a lens through which literally millions of middle-class adults have seen the humiliations of poverty: insufficient, poorly maintained affordable housing, decrepit schools with stressed teachers, unsafe neighborhoods, and other difficult circumstances. Although many Americans may already know that one in five children in our wealthy democracy live in poverty, this inequality somehow remains compartmentalized and largely ignored in our day-to-day lives.

Yet, deeply connecting with one child in poverty through a mentoring program can illuminate its pernicious effects, potentially mobilizing more sustained authentic action. Mentors’ negative stereotypes of disenfranchised groups are challenged by the many sources of strength in low-income and minority neighborhoods. Indeed, when middle class mentors bear witness to caring that exists in families, religious institutions, and grassroots community organizations, and to the level of commitment that many low-income parents marshal in support of their children, it remains much more difficult to blame the victim. In other words, through proximity, mentoring helps challenge dominant narratives and make us, in Mead’s words, “informed advocates for the needs of all children.”

A qualitative evidence synthesis of 35 studies found that adults often described mentoring as helping them humanize others, reflect on their own identities and biases, recognize environmental influences on development, and imagine contributions to community change (Anderson et al., 2023). Mentors working with racially diverse, working-class adolescents involved in the justice system described a similar process: connection across difference helped them recognize personal and environmental challenges and develop greater cultural consciousness (Duron et al., 2020).

There is also some evidence that mentors’ beliefs change over time. In a nine-month study, White mentors matched with BIPOC youth showed increased beliefs that discrimination limits Black Americans’ opportunities (Simpson et al., 2023). Interviews with White mentors of Black youth likewise found increased awareness of privilege and previously overlooked social conditions (Jones et al., 2022). These findings fit the experience described above: a relationship can make inequality less abstract and harder to keep at a distance.

Class-based contact research speaks directly to the movement from proximity to attribution. In an experimental study, positive contact with working-class people reduced middle- and upper-class participants’ sense that they personally contributed to inequality and increased their willingness to support collective action for equality (Vázquez et al., 2022). This is close to the shift described in the post: poverty becomes less easily explained as the result of deficient families and more plausibly understood as the product of housing, schooling, labor, health, and policy conditions.

But recent research also supplies an important warning. A 2026 multi-study paper found that positive contact with people experiencing poverty reduced hostile classism while sometimes increasing benevolent or complementary forms of classism (Sainz et al., 2026). In other words, contact may replace open contempt with an appreciation for how admirable, resilient, or deserving of help marginalized families are, but still understood through paternalistic categories. Admiration is not the same as working for equality. Seeing a parent’s devotion should not turn that devotion into another reason to overlook the systems that make care so difficult. Observations challenge deficit narratives when they expand the picture of what communities contain and what families already do. But they become less useful when they are treated as inspirational evidence that communities can overcome any obstacle without changes in housing, schools, safety, income, or public policy (Cocco et al., 2023).

The field’s recent equity-focused scholarship makes the same point at the program level. Formal mentoring programs are urged to center critical consciousness, racial equity, social justice, community partnerships, and youth–adult collaboration rather than locating risk primarily inside young people and their families (Hagler et al., 2023). Mentoring is more likely to support advocacy when it is embedded in an ecology that includes training, supervision, family engagement, community knowledge, and opportunities for collective action. When a connection is connected with institutional support for action, mentoring can move beyond private sympathy toward the informed advocacy that this work requires.

References

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