MEMBER NEWS: I’d Be Dead Without It’: How Mentoring Is Changing The Lives Of Care Leavers In Scotland

28 October 2020

MEMBER NEWS: I’d Be Dead Without It’: How Mentoring Is Changing The Lives Of Care Leavers In Scotland

Our members MCR Pathways have been featured by the Guardian.  This article discusses the impact that mentoring has had on mentees and the importance of education to the young people on the programme.  

If it weren’t for mentoring, says 21-year-old Billy McMillan from Glasgow’s Easterhouse, he would be “in prison like my father was at my age, or – most likely based on the outcomes for Glaswegian men from my background – I’d be dead”.

McMillan’s childhood was a turbulent one, and in foster care he found himself struggling with poor mental health and suicidal thoughts. “By the time I was in high school I wasn’t really a person, I was a collection of broken things,” he says. “I couldn’t read, spell, ride a bike, swim … I couldn’t tie my own shoelaces.”

When he was 14, McMillan took part in a new scheme to provide targeted support to vulnerable young people. Launched in 2007, the MCR Pathways programme provides those who are or have been in care with one-to-one mentoring during their final three years of school. McMillan says having a mentor changed his life. “Everything was different – having somebody who I was anonymous to, who didn’t judge me and wasn’t a threat to me.”

Photo credit - The Guardian website 

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