When Josh graduated on a warm Sunday in May 2007, his high school diploma ended our relationship. I wrote a column about how that door closing affected me, which was considerable. Here’s how it started:

“Go ahead. Mentor. Do it. Sign the simple, powerful contract between you and a young person. Plant an hour a week and reap a changed world.”

If you’re thinking this space is taking a break from the machinations of modern civic and political discourse, you’re mistaken. The subject of age has captured many recent headlines. That’s what I’m doing here. Writing about age … but on the other end of the continuum: teenage.

Eighty year olds may change the world today, but young people will have to live in it … a long time. Or until they change it themselves. So why not equip them properly: Enlarge their social development, increase their resilience, up their problem-solving game, embrace their futures through goal setting and decrease the likelihood they’ll fall prey to risky behaviors. According to research, those are the benefits of mentoring — enough for mentored teens to move the needle now and in the future.

As for a changed world, hopes, dreams, progress and goodness surely fill the current one. But enough hells and handbaskets have taken up residence in our minds and matters, that a course correction is in order. For further details see any local front page or wade into the cesspools of social media.

Then consider how a young person feels, already dealing with the normal burdens that teens face to fit in, count, and be accepted. And now they must deal with an eroding undertow of exclusion practiced publicly by those who should know better, those who never will, and those whose skill set is limited to demeaning or dismissing — some of whom hold holy books when they do.

So yes, I’m writing about age … but also about mentors, adults outside a teen’s immediate family and the critical relationships between them and their teenage mentees.

Josh was my TeamMate, so our official relationship terminated the day he walked across the big stage, sheepskin in hand. TeamMates is the school-based mentoring program started by Tom Osborne.

I was matched with Josh when he was a seventh grader. He was the first of my six TeamMates, and, as it was with him, I met Taylor, Sean, Rashawn, Aiden and Alex exclusively at school — lunch hours, study halls, free periods. We played games, did homework (I was of little help with algebra), shot hoops, played catch, built mechanical doodads but mostly “chopped it up” (talked), as the kids like to say, for less than an hour a week.

When I started to work at Hastings College, I had to give up being a TeamMate. I knew the decision would preclude me from my weekly visits with Alex. What I wasn’t prepared for was the impact on me not having a TeamMate. Once again, it was considerable.

My column on Josh’s graduation day started with the imperative above, but my message was twofold. First, mentoring on its face works because a caring, consistent adult imparts experience and perhaps even wisdom to a teenager. That was true for me, too, but my TeamMate experience differed slightly. Sure, I passed along my two cents when I could. But I always seemed to get more out of the relationship than I put in, simply by being a constant in their lives, being there once a week and “chopping it up” until graduation.

My guys ran the gamut of circumstances, too, from fairly stable, middle class families to homelessness. While that had some relevance, no situation precludes what is the underlying premise for mentoring relationships — whether it’s any of the 60 formal mentoring programs in Nebraska or the millions of informal one-on-one mentoring relationships across the country: A kid’s corner can never have too many caring adults in it.

Which was my second point: Research shows that while mentoring relationships may seem natural or free flowing, formal programs provide mentors in the greatest numbers. Plus, the need for adults to step up remains great, including in Nebraska.

So why not? Why not mentor? Why not do something about the age question?

Need time to do it? At my newspaper, we mentors convinced our bosses that mentoring was important enough to spare us for an hour a week. You can do the same.

Go ahead. Mentor.

You might even change the world a little. You surely will change a teenager’s. And, if you’re lucky … yours, too.

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