Today is Thank Your Mentor Day and Lechun Smith, 11, plans to thank his YouthNet mentor the old fashioned way, by spending more time with her.

?I think just by turning up on time and spending more time with her, should make her happy,? said Lechun who attends Dellwood Middle School. His mentor is Clare Mello, executive director of YouthNet.

YouthNet is a school-based mentoring programme that matches students with caring adults and in some cases older students. Last year, YouthNet mentors spent more than 9,000 hours with Bermuda?s young people.

Today at noon YouthNet will be pairing up with another mentor group, Big Brothers and Big Sisters, on the steps of City Hall to listen to Premier Alex Scott and a host of speakers from the community talk about the benefits of mentoring. This is the second annual Thank Your Mentor Day.

Last Wednesday, reporter Jessie Moniz met with several YouthNet pairs to talk about the YouthNet experience. (See this Friday?s Lifestyle for a similar feature on Big Brothers and Big Sisters.)

TiaeVince Douglas, 11, attends Dellwood Middle School and is matched with Jane Smith, a legal secretary in the Attorney General?s Chambers. TiaeVince?s answers to questions about having a YouthNet mentor tended to be one word.

How do you like having a mentor?: ?A lot?.

What was it like before you had a mentor?: ?Boring?.

Then TiaeVince?s whole face lit up as he started to talk about the time he went on a sailboat with his mentor, Mrs. Smith, and the engine failed.

?I?d never been on one before,? TiaeVince said. ?I wasn?t scared when the engine cut out, because I didn?t even know it had happened. We just sailed the rest of the way. They put the boat where it went and they drove me home.?

TiaeVince represents a switch for YouthNet. A few years ago they started out mentoring mainly older students, but have now grown to include primary school children.

?It is easier to develop that relationship at a younger age,? said Ms Mello. ?In primary school they are a little more open to everything, diversity of age, race, gender. Our plan is to stay with primary kids through to middle school and senior school. In senior school it changes a little bit. They become more independent. Predominantly, the lion?s share of our kids are now in primary school. It has worked out great. In fact, we just brought on Prospect Primary and Northlands. We are now in all schools in Hamilton.?

YouthNet mentors meet for an hour a week at the student?s school, usually during the lunch period. TiaeVince?s mentor, Mrs. Smith, is not a woman of leisure. She has a job, two grown sons and an otherwise busy life, yet, she still finds that an hour a week with TiaeVince is not enough.

?I don?t find the hour enough, particularly now that he is in bigger school,? she said. ?I have asked his mother if I can pick him up after school on Mondays. I want to spend more time with him to really bond and get to know him. I am very pokey and I ask him a lot of questions. I explain to him that he can call me up.?

Mrs. Smith decided to become a mentor when she saw an advertisement for YouthNet.

?I called immediately and went over,? she said. ?It was quite an interview. They don?t just take anyone. Fortunately, I got a great child.?

To kids who might be considering becoming a mentor, TiaeVince said ?it is a lot of fun?. When asked if he minds giving up his lunch hour, he answered with an emphatic ?no?.

The programme grows largely through word of mouth. Another child often follows Mrs. Smith and TiaeVince during their meetings at school, and he has been put on the waiting list for his own mentor.

?Mentoring is quite popular,? said Ms Mello. ?When other kids see kids with mentors, then they ask for one as well. So we get a waiting list that way. We try to keep it even so we can get them mentors. If there are two friends and one of them has a mentor and the other doesn?t, we might ask the mentor to take on two kids until we find them their own mentor.?

Mrs. Smith has also taken TiaeVince to work to show him the Attorney General?s Chambers.

Ms Mello said that although YouthNet is a school-based mentoring programme, many of the mentors do things with their mentees outside of school.

?Many of our mentors take their kids to soccer and drama or do work-site mentoring,? Ms Mello said. Architect and mentor Jason Jones said he has frequently taken his mentee Kimario, 16, to work. He and Kimario have been friends for several years and they share a love of cars. They sometimes go to a parking lot and just walk around admiring different vehicles. ?During the last hurricane the bike of one of my work colleagues got washed away so I told Kimario she didn?t need it anymore and if he wanted it to go and get it,? said Mr. Jones. ?So he went to the Airport car park and got it. Then over the course of six months he stripped it down and rebuilt it. Kimario did most of the stripping down and rebuilding himself. I helped him to spray it. We did a couple of last little details.?

Kimario said he painted the bike orange and black.

?I have learned a lot from Jason,? said Kimario.

?Putting a project together with Kimario, it was good to see him learn a lot of different things about bike building,? said Mr. Jones. ?I have seen him grow up over the last four years and seen him become slightly more talkative. It has been good. It has saved me having my own kid and I never had a brother.?

With Mr. Jones? help Kimario actually designed his own hub caps for the bike, and it is almost finished. Only the brakes need adjusting.

One of YouthNet?s longest standing mentees and Berkeley Institute student, Daniel Johnson, 18, recently became a mentor himself as part of a new programme launched by YouthNet last year called PeerNet.

?With PeerNet we anticipate having over 300 relationships in 15 schools,? said Ms Mello. ?This will represent an over 300 percent growth since June 2003 and will make YouthNet one of the Island?s largest volunteer organisations with over 600 active volunteers.?

?It wasn?t that hard to make the switch from mentee to mentor,? said Daniel who was a mentee of James Conyers. Daniel hopes to go to the Bermuda College and study business administration. ?I just used the basic skills that James uses, such as communication skills. I find that it is helping me to be a better person in life. I find that my presence in my mentee?s life is having a positive impact. My mentee is 13-years-old. I have been meeting with him for a couple of weeks. I finding it really interesting to talk to him. We are both guys and we are both young, so it didn?t take long to get that bond going. We are both on the same level; he is real mature for his age.?

Daniel said the first meeting was easy. He met his new mentee in the YouthNet boardroom and they had pizza.

?Everyone?s first time would be a little shaky,? he said. ?We got to talking and it was fine.?

Daniel said he hopes his mentee will try to be like him or better.

?I am trying to groom him to be a better person in life,? he said. ?I try to ask him about his work. I tell him if he ever needs help, I am always there.?

Attorney Janita Burke Waldron who is a mentor for Ashley Isaac, 14, of Berkeley Institute, was inspired to join YouthNet by her own work mentor, David Lines who was a founding member of YouthNet.

?My pupil master when I was starting out as an attorney a few years ago was David Lines,? she said. ?I got involved at the board level at that stage. I love young people. I like to think I am young myself. That is where it started. I had a mentee prior to Ashley and she went to live abroad. The opportunity opened up for me to be a mentor to Ashley and I took it.

?Ashley makes me tired,? said Ms Waldron with much laughter. ?No, I am really enjoying it. She is a wonderful young person. She has a lot of potential. I am there to help her explore it.

?She probably thinks I push her hard, but that is probably because I see a lot of potential in her and I want the best for her. I try to make it fun and be real.

?Young people are facing a lot of issues today that I don?t think we faced a number of years ago. The world is changing. I want her to know that she can talk to me about anything if she needs help making choices. The choices that we make shape our lives. Sometimes young people make inappropriate choices because they don?t have access to all of the facts and information. That is what I try to do with her. We chat. We meet at Berkeley. At Dellwood we had more room to sit off and meet. There are not a lot of open spaces at Berkeley. There are more young people in lunch hour at the same time.?

?I am going to be a forensic scientist,? said Ashley. ?Before I had a mentor I used to be lazy, now she is always getting behind me.?

Dellwood Middle School student Aaron Famous, 11, who is a mentee with Dominique Mayo, 11, with mentor Michel Simmons said he is very grateful to have a mentor. ?I am going to thank him for all the times he came to see me, even though sometimes he is busy. I think he is trying his hardest to be with me.?