Thomas J. Turner
President/Executive Director
Thomas J. Turner, a native of Madison County Tennessee, believes that all children and youth should have the opportunity to a successful and productive life. Thomas is President and Founder of Thomas J. Turner & Associates, Inc. a Non-Profit Corporation. The mission statement of the corporation is to make a positive difference in the lives of children and youth by providing services that will enhance their quality of life and help them become productive citizens in the community. The focus of this organization is to offer Mentoring, End of Course/ACT Preparation, Tutoring and Cultural Awareness to all individuals in need. The program will provide youth with the skills and values needed to have a successful life. The acronym JACK Just Another Chance for Kids sponsored by Thomas J. Turner & Associates, Inc. is used to introduce the Award Winning RESEARCHED Based TALKS Mentoring Program. The TALKS Mentoring Program is about twelve years old and was started in Champaign Illinois by Dr. Harold Davis. This program was developed to address the negative behavior the school district was seeing with young men. The program was originally designed to encourage men to mentor but was later expanded to include women to mentor young women.. The TALKS Program has been scientifically evaluated with positive outcomes. The research data can be viewed at www.talksmentoring.org. The program uses a content based curriculum in a structured, small group format. The curriculum is based on tried and proven success principles. Several Mental Health Agencies support the TALKS model in their city because they see the curriculum servings as preventive in nature. Volunteer mentors share concepts with the children in one hour weekly mentoring sessions. The structure calls for one mentor to be paired with three children. This creative grouping calls for one high, medium, and low performing child to be in each group.
Mission Statement
To make a positive difference in the lives of children and youth by providing services that will enhance their quality of life and help them to become productive citizens in the community. It is our focus to offer Mentoring, Gateway/ACT Preparation, Tutoring and Cultural Awareness to all individuals in need. Our program will provide youth with the skills and values needed to have a successful life.
Benefits for Schools
Our nation's schools and workplaces are only becoming more varied in terms of culture, background, etc., and in order to pursue a future without bounds, chiildren need to be able to move outside the limits of their own homes and communities and become socially competent to navigate other, not so familiar worlds. TALKS Mentoring seems to serve as a platform for such exploration and is an important first step for children transitioning through middle and late childhood who are beginning to learn the necessary skills. What children learn through participation in TALKS Mentoring is expected to have equally favorable consequences on schools themselves through improvement in classroom dynamic. As children learn how to communicate more effectively with their teachers and peers, they are increasingly equipped with the tools necessary to circumvent problematic classroom behavior. In other words, a boost in children's emotional intelligence has direct consequences on their ability to function in a group or classroom setting.
Benefits for Youth
Participation in TALKS has the potential to shape children's personality and social development through the learning of conflict resolution and social interaction skills.
Deep conversations afford children an opportunity to express their opinions and learn how to converse around sensative issues such as those addressed in the TALKS curriculum. A small group mentoring format appears to be an excellent experience for youth to practice this type of communication both with their peers and with adults and represents an opportunity for intergenerational contact that may not be readily available to many children outside the school context.
Those youth who believed they spent more time learning about themselves through discussions during the mentoring sessions were also more likely to report higher conflict resolution skills.
Deep conversations afford children an opportunity to express their opinions and learn how to converse around sensative issues such as those addressed in the TALKS curriculum. A small group mentoring format appears to be an excellent experience for youth to practice this type of communication both with their peers and with adults and represents an opportunity for intergenerational contact that may not be readily available to many children outside the school context.
Those youth who believed they spent more time learning about themselves through discussions during the mentoring sessions were also more likely to report higher conflict resolution skills.
Benefits for Mentors
On the individual side, mentors were appreciative of the opportunity to learn about themselves through the process of learning about youth culture of today. They seemed to find the wisdom they were sharing with youth refreshing, iin that it reminded them of personal lessons that they may have learned long ago and hope to share with their own children. Mentors furthermore describe coming to terms with some of the issues they have faced in their own past that perhaps they did not have the tools or insight to confront fully at the time. Thus, the "transferring a little wisdom systematically" process appears to be shared among all TALKS participants, not only among youth. On the collective side, mentors perceive their volunteer mentoring as service to a community in need. Through investing in the lives of a few young children, they have also invested in their own efficacies as community members capable of contributing to the collective good. Some mentors cited concern with the quality of children's education as a reason for their becomming a mentor; thus through mentoring, they are doing what small part they can to remediate this problem. For those individuals who have not been active in the community before, it is hoped that the mentoring experience will enable them to perceive the virtue of giving back on a regular basis for the purpose of collective good.
Peer Support
Support from one's mentor was related to children's perceptions of support from their peers. In fact, the effect of mentoring relationship quality on perceived peer support was quite large. For a one-unit increase on the relationship quality scale, youth were 50 times more likely to perceive high versus medium-low emotional and informational support from their peers. This effect was found while controlling for all other demographic and background variables in the model and reveals what may be another major impact of TALKS in this population of youth. Apart from and perhaps related to helping children improve their interpersonal skills, participation in TALKS mentoring appears to increase youth's perceptions of emotional and informational support from their peers. Although this finding might be intuitive, it suggests that the opportunity for emotinal disclosure in a small group setting helps children to relate better to their peers, which, in turn, improves their perceptions of available peer support. The implications of this finding restate the theoretical premise of TALKS Mentoring: that recognizing one's own orientation should enable one to interact more effectively with others in a nonconfrontational way. Perceptions of support, in turn, will improve, and it appears the entire process is facilitated through participation in a high quality mentoring relationship.