Oakland Serves is seeking volunteer mentors to help struggling high school students starting in Fall of 2021. Oakland Serves is a non-profit volunteer organization that seeks to reduce the dropout rate of OUSD public high school students and help them persist to graduation. We emphasize academic mentoring (get the class assignments done and turned in) as well as classical mentoring (listen, empathize, build trust, offer steady encouragement), offered by well trained volunteer mentors. We work closely with the schools - they identify students at risk of dropping out and match our mentors to mentees who agree to weekly virtual meetings. The time commitment is only once a week for about two hours during school hours.

Currently (2020/2021 school year) mentors are being placed at Oakland and McClymonds high schools in a distance learning capacity. (I.E. mentoring over Zoom or Google Classroom). However with schools slowly opening back up we anticipate that there will be both in-person and on-line mentoring this fall.

You can be a mentor! With a background check and short on-line training sessions, you can help a young person graduate high school and open up their lives to new possibilities.