Young Adults from Foster Care
Paid to mentor Youth in Foster Care
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Our Unique and Effective Mentoring Model
The Route 21 mentoring model has been refined over a period of 13 years while serving the most vulnerable and underserved youth.
"Pit Crew"
A team that helps refresh, equip and care for the Mentor who spent time in foster care growing up.
Mentor
Young adults who also grew up in foster care are paid to be a mentor to youth currently in care.
Youth
High school aged youth who were or are in care are mentored by someone who grew up in care themselves.
ACTIVITIES
Breakfast
Once a week during the school year mentors and youth have breakfast together before school. Mentor and youth talk about life, school, grades and some of the Route 21 curriculum.
Outings
Twice a month the whole cohort does group outings like movies, go karts and paintball. The group time together makes memories, forms trusted bonds and helps relieve the pressures of life.
Skills
Quarterly mentors and youth meet as a group to learn about life skills related to our acronym W.H.E.E.L.S.: Wealth, Health, Education, Emotions, Life Skills and Spiritual. Youth get to steer the direction of their own development.
CURRICULUM
W.H.E.E.L.S. is Route 21’s curriculum that our amazing mentors, who have lived experience in foster care, have helped develop to prepare our mentees for life after they grow out of foster care. Youth get to choose their path through W.H.E.E.L.S. and slowly drive through all six aspects of W.H.E.E.L.S. during their years of high school. W.H.E.E.L.S. has been getting wonderful feedback from the foster care community at large.
Wealth – How to grow generational wealth
Health – Why take care of your body
Education – How to be a lifelong learner
Emotions – Identify and regulate emotions
Life Skills – Bills, laundry, interviews… etc.
Spiritual – Nurture inner spirit and practices
1,000 YEARS
Route 21 has accumulated 1,000+ years of experience into our mentoring model and curriculum so that it is tailored to the needs of youth in care. The advice has come from youth in care, those that grew up in care, foster care parents and those who work in the field. If someone was 35 years old and spent 4 years in foster care we counted 4 years toward our total, not 35 years. That means we have met with A LOT of people we are well informed to help our mentors and youth.
TBRI Practitioners
Rebecca Newell, Route 21 HR Director, is trained as a Trust-Based Relational Intervention (TBRI) practitioner. TBRI is a trauma-informed, whole-youth approach to caring for vulnerable children and youth. Grounded in attachment theory and developmental neuroscience, TBRI helps Route 21 mentors to see the needs and meet the needs of their mentees. The TBRI caregiving model is based on three sets of interacting principles: Connecting, Empowering, and Correcting. Consistent with the three pillars of trauma-informed care, the three sets of principles focus on building trust and felt-safety in the context of healthy relationships (Connecting), developing self-regulation skills (Empowering), and fostering behavioral and social competence (Correcting). Rebecca trains all of Route 21 staff in TBRI practices to help mentors process their own histories and help them be great mentors for youth that experience some of the greatest trauma youth can see.
Leadership
Rick and Rebecca Newell spent 10 years building a very similar near-peer paid mentoring model called M.U.S.T., which serves the most underserved and vulnerable black American males in Seattle Public Schools. It has proven to be highly successful and effective. Rick and Rebecca always wanted the leadership of M.U.S.T. to reflect the population that it serves so over the years they identified good leaders then trained and empowered that leadership. In December of 2021 they handed the organization over and they stepped away from M.U.S.T.
The very first M.U.S.T. cohort had a young man who was in foster care. Rick and Rebecca’s experiences with him built a growing passion to use what they have learned through M.U.S.T. to help youth in foster care with the same near-peer paid mentoring model.
Rick and Rebecca know how to build a successful and stable non profit from the ground up. They also know how hire well and identify quality leadership to run the organization. Like M.U.S.T., they plan to eventually raise up good leadership and then step aside and let leadership with lived experience in foster care lead Route 21 into its bright future.
Prior to working in non-profits, Rick had a career in computers working at companies like Microsoft, Sun Microsystems and Cingular. Rick and Rebecca have four awesome sons and live in south Seattle.
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