Amanda Stubbert: Welcome to the SPU Voices podcast, where we tell personal stories with universal impact. I’m your host, Amanda Stubbert, and today we sat down with Lee Montgomery. After 18 years serving as a probation officer with the Lewis County Juvenile Court, Lee saw how easily kids without a strong support system found themselves getting into trouble. He had to do something to help slow the cycle of poverty and incarceration, so he started the Lewis County Youth Mentorship Program with a mission to inspire youth through meaningful relationships to make positive choices that build resiliency, encourage growth, and enable them to pursue a successful future. Lee, thank you so much for joining us today.
Lee Montgomery: Yes, thank you for having me.
Amanda: Well, your bachelor’s degree from SPU is in psychology. I also have a psychology degree. It’s a very broad field. What made you choose juvenile probation officer as a career path?
Lee: Ooh, good question. One of the two degrees that was required was behavioral science or criminal law. All my other colleagues have criminal law, and I have a psychology degree. You have to learn how to work with people as well as criminal law, so I had to learn the criminal law side. They had to learn how to work with people. It works both ways.
Amanda: Why were you attracted to that as a job?
Lee: Because it gave me an opportunity to help kids. Especially if you’re making a change in people’s lives, earlier on is better, right, to make an impact there. I just saw the negative impact of so many things in our society that affected kids, and so many of the kids that were struggling to make it in life, go to school, just survive. I wanted to jump in and do something about that.
Amanda: That’s so great. I think a lot of people want to help, but I think it’s hard to get that deep into the system and stay there. Eighteen years. I know you had a break in there. You guys went on the mission field for a while and came back.
Lee: Yes.
Amanda: What would you say is the hardest part about being a probation officer?
Lee: The hardest part is working with the parents. It’s a struggle. We have jurisdiction over the kids on probation, so we can require them to do certain things. But most of the negative impact in their life comes from the family, from the home life, and we don’t have jurisdiction there at all. So we do offer a lot of services to try and make an impact. We just can’t require that. When we get pushback from parents on things, it makes it very difficult to do our job.
Amanda: Sure, sure. And what’s the flipside? Because obviously, 18 years, there’s got to be a lot of positive in there too.
Lee: There is.
Amanda: What’s your favorite part of the job?
Lee: You do see a lot of changing kids. You don’t always hear about it, just like in any kind of ministry you don’t hear or see the impact until many years later. But my view is that if I can even just slow down this downward spiral of kids, then I’ve made an impact, hopefully to turn around and have them do great. We do occasionally have a few kids that come back and check in with us and let us know how they’re doing. I have one young man who comes back on the anniversary that he got off probation with me to thank me for all I did for him. We have a couple that just stop by once, twice a year and just give me updates on what they’re doing and how life is going. Those are always rewarding and encouraging times.
Amanda: You must have the picture of those faces in your head on the really hard days.
Lee: Yes. (laughs) Absolutely.
Amanda: Yeah, the days where you’re like, “I am making a difference. I am making a difference.”
Lee: Yes.
Amanda: This is what you’re observing day in and day out, the lack of support from families, and sometimes even pushing kids towards a negative outcome. When did you decide a mentorship program was what was needed?
Lee: I’ve had the whole idea of mentorship on my mind for quite a few years. I talked to my boss and we just kind of put it on the back burner, especially with COVID. We were looking at it a few years before that. I’ve talked with other youth-serving agencies, and they say, “Yeah, we want to do a mentorship program too,” and nobody was doing anything. So at one point, I said, “We need to make this something on our forefront.” The impact of mental health on kids is just phenomenal. I have some statistics I’ll share here in just a moment. I met with some other youth-serving agencies and said, “We need to do something. What can we do? What is it going to take to make this happen?” We sat down in a room with some whiteboards and we talked about goals and what’s it going to look like and what’s it going to take. That was the beginning of this whole, I guess, step in making it happen.
I can jump back to some statistics. The 2021 Health Youth Survey, which counties do every couple years: in Lewis County, roughly one-third of 8th graders and 10th graders reported feeling so bad or hopeless in the previous 12 months that they stopped participating in usual activities. A quarter of the sixth graders said they seriously thought about killing themselves.
“The 2021 Health Youth Survey, which counties do every couple years: in Lewis County, roughly one-third of 8th graders and 10th graders reported feeling so bad or hopeless in the previous 12 months that they stopped participating in usual activities. A quarter of the sixth graders said they seriously thought about killing themselves.”
Amanda: A quarter.
Lee: A quarter of sixth graders.
Amanda: 25%.
Lee: Yes.
Amanda: Wow.
Lee: Yeah. In regards to the kids that come through our juvenile court, 14% of them have attempted suicide at least once.
Amanda: Wow.
Lee: So mental health issues, depression, that type of thing are huge. And so these are focusing on the county that I live in. In Lewis County, there are about 80,000 people, but I think that’s probably, across the state, similar in that. Here’s some more: 50% use drugs and alcohol; 78% were unlikely to graduate from high school; 40% have no positive adult relationship in their life; and 50% have no pro-social community ties at all. So they’re just lacking that support. They’re feeling depressed. They’re considering suicide. So we wanted to do something to step in. And instead of just talking about it and saying, “That would be nice to have,” I wanted to make something happen. So I pulled these other agencies in together, said, “Let’s make this work. What are we going to do?”
Amanda: Yeah. We’ve heard of things like Boys and Girls Club.
Lee: Mm-hmm.
Amanda: Why aren’t those, the established programs, why aren’t those working in Lewis County?
Lee: In Lewis County, we do not have Big Brothers, Big Sisters.
Amanda: Okay.
Lee: We’ve had it in the past. Years ago when I tried to get a Big Sister for a young lady, it was two years out. They told me it was going to be four years out before they could do something for a male. So that just wasn’t going to work.
Amanda: Four years.
Lee: Yeah.
Amanda: They’re going to be out of the program by the time that …
Lee: (laughs) Exactly right, yes. We do have a Boys and Girls Club ― one ― in our county that really focuses on the elementary age. We needed something for the teens that I’m working with. So I said, “We’ve got to do something to make this happen.” So we put this idea together. We presented this idea to the Lewis County commissioners, and we said, “We need some funding for this.” They were wholeheartedly behind it, and they gave us a half a million dollars to make this happen.
Amanda: Wow.
Lee: Which is huge.
Amanda: Yeah.
Lee: We were thinking just a few thousand. They gave us half a million, which was fantastic. The next year I spent designing a manual, how to make this work. Contacted the national mentor program, state mentor program, other agencies around the nation, our HR department, all sorts of different people, and said, “What details do we need to have in this to make it work?” There’s a lot of mentorship programs out there that fail and there are a lot that succeed, and so we wanted to have the elements and the components in there that make it succeed. I looked closely at all the data. “What do we need to do? What do we need to have in there?” And so we came up with what we’ve currently got. I took a lot of recommendations from other youth-serving agencies in our county, because it needs to apply to our county, right? Because every county handles things differently. The people are different, so you need to apply it to what works for your county. And so, “What works? And what doesn’t work? And how do we make this happen? And what’s a good idea for this? And how do we come up with this?” We got feedback and we put this all together and then we launched it.
Amanda: And here we are.
Lee: Yes.
Amanda: Yeah, such good work. I just can’t overstate that. But here we are. You need money, you need a system, and you need to do a lot of research to make sure you have the right system.
Lee: Yes.
Amanda: So you have the money. You have the research. You have the system. How do you find enough mentors?
Lee: Yeah, that’s a big challenge. When I was first discussing this with people, I had a lot of adults say, “Hey, when you get it going, I want to be a mentor,” so I was very encouraged by that. I thought, “I’m not going to have too much problem.” We’ve had a couple small groups that come through our training, and so that’s been encouraging, but it’s kind of trailed off from there. So we’re working real hard on that, getting the word out there, on the radio, posting places, talking to different groups. I’ve spoken to the Sertoma Group and some other serving agencies in our county and said, “Here’s what we got going, and we are looking for mentors.” Right now we have 21 mentors and we have 29 kids that are into it. We just need more mentors because we expect this to grow. We just started. It launched in January. We got our new coordinator hired. I’m not running the program. I designed it and then I just kind of help support it.
Amanda: January of 2023.
Lee: Yep.
Amanda: Just so whenever somebody listens to this episode.
Lee: Yes. (laughs) And in March we hired our coordinator. Started the recruitment of mentors. Put our first batch of mentors through our training, because we want to make sure they’re well trained for what they’re doing. Working with kids that lack support, a lot of them have experienced trauma and there are going to be behaviors and reactions to things, and we want to make sure our mentors are prepared for that. So there are some eligibility things there that we require of our mentors as well. Then we did our first matching in June and so those mentors and mentees have been meeting since June, and it’s going well. Getting a lot of good feedback and good stories from that.
Amanda: What does that commitment look like? Because I can imagine, like, I want to raise my hand and say, “Me, me, me! I want to be a mentor!” But you also need to commit.
Lee: Yes.
Amanda: Because these kids have lost all their support systems or never had any, so the last thing you want to do is provide it and then take it away.
Lee: Correct.
Amanda: So tell me about what that commitment looks like.
Lee: Sure. We are asking for a minimum of one year, preferably longer if they are able to do that, but a minimum of one year, both from the mentees as well as the mentors. We want a minimum one-year commitment, and as long as they want to keep going, we want them to keep going. Because research shows the short-term mentorship just does not make a long-term impact. It makes a short-term impact, but not long-term. So a teacher, a coach doing it for a school year, for nine months, is great for the short term, but doesn’t make that long-term impact. So by having a mentor that sticks with you through at least a year, preferably 18 months, two years, two and a half years, that makes a long-term impact on the kids’ lives. They feel they’re being heard. They feel they’re being supported. They’re getting guidance for things, which they don’t have otherwise. That’s where it comes in, yeah.
Amanda: Yeah, and I could see it building a bridge as well. Like if you can’t stick with the kid through their entire adolescence, but if there’s a good teacher, a good coach, you have this mentor step in. They’re together while the time with that teacher ends, the time with that coach, and then they bridge until they have a new coach or a new teacher in their life. So I could see how that would be a big stepping stone towards long-term change.
Lee: Yes. So many of the kids do have people that are involved in their life and then are gone, and they feel lost. And then next time comes around and they’re more guarded and less likely to jump into that relationship. So having a long-term mentor is huge.
Amanda: That’s something that I think we’re all internally familiar with, but we wouldn’t think of it externally, like, “Oh, I’m a mentor for a year. That’s great. I fed into a kid.” But yeah, when you finally have someone you can trust, to lose that person and lose that trust makes it that much harder to trust anyone else again.
Lee: Correct, yes.
Amanda: And, of course, it’s the medical term, “Do no harm.” You want to provide something good for these kids and do no harm along the way.
Lee: Yes. Yes.
Amanda: Which is why you’ve done all this fabulous research and made sure you’re doing things the right way. Can you explain the difference between prevention and intervention?
Lee: Sure. Intervention is when youth are involved with the juvenile justice system, and so we’re trying to intervene and keep them from coming back again. Often kids will come through three, four, five, six times. New crimes, truancy, whatever the issue is there. So there we’re intervening. Those are a little more serious resources that are taken there, so different types of therapy, drug and alcohol treatment, long-term treatment there. Those are those interventions. Early interventions are when a kid comes and it’s their first time involved in the juvenile justice system. We have a couple programs that target those who it’s the first contact into the system.
The mentorship program is a prevention, so that’s before they get involved. Maybe they’re at risk because they don’t have that support, and so we want to do things in their life, provide opportunities, provide interventions, but it’s prevention at this point, preventing them from getting into the system. That will make the impact.
Amanda: Which not only the human life is so much better with prevention, but just dollars and cents. I mean, putting money into a mentorship program that will prevent the need for intervention later, right? That is the best use of our dollars.
Lee: (laughs) Yes. It is. It’s difficult to get the state to buy into that. They’re really putting the dollars into intervention, because that’s where they see the impact of their dollars immediately. Prevention is long-term. It’s not something immediately. In putting this together, we’ve studied some other states that have started similar programs like this. They had to kind of do it on their own for a while and show the results that this makes a difference. This is saving us state dollars. It’s making a bigger impact, obviously, but it’s saving us state dollars. At this point, to get this grant and our ARPA funds that the county commissioners gave us, helps us to run for four years at this point. But we’re already starting to go, “What are we going to do to keep this going beyond those four years?” That’s where we’ve got to show the stats saying, “This is making a difference. It’s reducing down the cost for the state through the criminal justice system and truancy and other issues, so it’s saving the state lots of money. Give us some of it to keep it going.”
Amanda: Right. Not to mention the generational change of not being in the system.
Lee: Absolutely.
Amanda: Right? Being able to finish school, maybe go to college, provide for their family in a better way.
Lee: Right. It changes the whole society, whole community there.
Amanda: But, of course, like you said, it has to be both, because the people who are writing the checks have to make wise decisions too.
Lee: Yes.
Amanda: So yeah, it’s great that you are doing all that research and making sure all those things are in place. Tell us more about the program itself. You’re providing events and things now?
Lee: Yes, the mentors, once they put in an application to be a mentor, we tell them what the requirements are. We make sure they’re vetted, the background check and all that. Then we provide training for them, and that’s about five sessions, around eight hours with the training initially, and then we have some ongoing trainings that are optional for them, but we want to keep them encouraged through that. We get the mentees from referrals from people. That can be a school counselor. It could be police department. It could be a service provider of some type. It can be parents. Kids can refer themselves. They can refer their friends. So we have those referrals coming in, and we do interviews with both the mentor and mentees and try to find matches and how that works. What’s kind of interesting ― I’ll just back up for a second here ― is one of the surprising things is where the referrals have come from for the mentees. We expected a lot of school counselors and school personnel to refer ones to us, but the greatest amount has come from self-referral, and it’s from high school students. We expected more on the junior high end, but a lot more high school students have self-referred them and referred their friends.
Amanda: Wow.
Lee: And that was surprising to us. They want somebody to listen to them. They want somebody to hang out, to make them feel valued. That’s what they’re looking for. So that was really surprising. Once that’s going on, then we give the guidelines to the mentors. “Here’s when you can meet with kids and how.” They make their own appointments. They can meet with them one on one in public places, and we have a list of those. If they want to do it outside of those public places, they have to have other people with them, so they need to find another mentor and mentee and go out in pairs. So, for example, if they wanted to go on a bike ride, they need to come in pairs. They don’t have to hang close together, but be within eyesight. So they can still have their one-on-one time, but they’re also protected that way. So there’s some safety features like that in the program.
Amanda: Sure.
Lee: We also provide a lot of outings, so these mentors can come on them with the kids and have some one-on-one time, but they’re in a group as well. We do a lot of those in the summertime. We would do one to three of those a week. Wintertime, we’re doing about twice a month. This past Thursday, I took a group of kids up to the Shelter Family Farm: corn maze, pumpkin patch, that type of stuff. None of them had ever been to a corn maze. Of course, the kids we’re working with, most of them have never experienced a lot of these outings in life, which is really sad. Many of them have never been to the ocean. They’ve never been to the mountains. Never seen a waterfall. You’d be surprised at things the kids have not done, because their families aren’t involved with them. So this gives them a lot of opportunities to spend time with their mentor as well as experience some fun things.
Amanda: Which is so bonding.
Lee: Yes.
Amanda: When you’re experiencing something new and wonderful, I mean, we all know that’s a bonding experience. Anybody who ever went to camp knows that that’s a great way to cement a relationship.
Lee: Right. Some of these kids, we just do these outings. A lot of the mentees come without their mentors, which is fine, and then some of the mentors come. And we’ve asked others to be a one-day mentor. “Come on this trip. Help me chaperone and be a one-day mentor to these kids and encourage them. Help them to see what a positive adult is like in their life.” It really encourages the kids as well as those who come. They’re all of a sudden saying, “Hey, I want to be a mentor for a kid. I want to do this long-term. I want to commit to them. I want to take them under my wing and just help them along.” So it’s pretty exciting.
Amanda: Yeah. What does success look like for the individual mentors? We talked about for the program itself, right? Over time, being able to show that you’re actually preventing the reasons that a kid would end up in the system. But lives are messy.
Lee: Yes.
Amanda: And this mentorship isn’t going to all of a sudden fix all the issues in the kid’s life, right?
Lee: Right.
Amanda: So when the mentors go through training, how do you describe to them what is success?
Lee: Success would be seeing the kid change in their relationship to people ― their friends, their family, teachers, people at school. Their self-confidence, their grades will go up. They’ll probably get involved in things. A mentorship in general shows a huge impact in all those areas, and that’s what we expect to see in ours as well. We’ve already heard some great stories. I’ll share one, a general story. A youth came to start school this fall, and they had started in June with a mentor, and the staff is calling us and saying, “This is a totally different kid. What’s happened here? They’re coming to school without their hood on. They’re communicating with us. They’re looking us in the eye. They’re talking. They’re laughing. They’re talking to other kids. They used to be shut down and didn’t say anything. We don’t know what’s going on.” And it’s all because they connected with this mentor, have been doing outings and getting out, sharing, feeling valued by that mentor. That’s just one example of a difference that we’re seeing already in just a few months.
“A youth came to start school this fall, and they had started in June with a mentor, and the staff is calling us and saying, ‘This is a totally different kid. What’s happened here? They’re coming to school without their hood on. They’re communicating with us. They’re looking us in the eye. They’re talking. They’re laughing. They’re talking to other kids. They used to be shut down and didn’t say anything. We don’t know what’s going on.’ And it’s all because they connected with this mentor, have been doing outings and getting out, sharing, feeling valued by that mentor.”
Amanda: Well, isn’t that the magic word, “value,” right?
Lee: Yes.
Amanda: To be seen and recognized and loved, and I mean, just seen is everything, right? Seen as something of value. When they’re not getting that at home, then they need it somewhere else.
Lee: Right, absolutely. Absolutely.
Amanda: If someone wants to get involved as a mentor – maybe not everybody lives in Lewis County, but let’s start there. If they want to get in your program or donate to it, where do they go to get information.
Lee: Our coordinator is who they would contact. We have an application online on the Lewis County webpage. We have a link in there that you go on and apply. You can ask for an application to be emailed or pick up a hard copy, either way. And then our coordinator would meet with them and do a vetting process, do an interview with them and kind of see where their heart’s at. Because we need to make sure not only are they safe, but they’ve also got a passion for this and that they’re going to be a good fit.
Amanda: That they’re going to stick through long enough as well.
Lee: Correct. Willing to make that commitment. Aren’t going to have other things interfere or kind of be wishy washy or something like that. We want secure people in there. They would contact Lisa, who’s our coordinator. Outside of our county, there’s several agencies that do that. I’ve contacted a number of them, several up here in King County. They would just look up one of those and apply through that way. The main thing is you really want to find out what the program does, what it allows, what you can do, how it all runs, because they’re all quite different. There is a national mentor program that provides a general manual of how to run a mentorship program, but there are so many variations in that, and depending on how the county’s run …
Amanda: And the community itself, right?
Lee: And the community itself.
Amanda: It has to match the personality of the people in the county, I’m sure.
Lee: It does, absolutely. Absolutely. That’s how people get involved. As far as businesses go, there’s a lot of support that we need. I want to back up a little bit on our story here earlier on. We have incredible support for outings that we do. I’ve got a list here. I just want to share a couple of the outings that we’ve gone on this summer. We went on mountain bike rides, several hikes to different waterfalls. We went kayaking. We’ve done fishing. We took kids to a drift car race. We’ve taken them to the Seahawks training camp. We went to a Rainiers baseball game. We went to the beach, clam digging. We got some snowshoes donated to us, so this winter we’re going to take them snowshoeing. So a lot of these activities these kids have never done. To the zoo. We went to Point Defiance Zoo a few weeks ago.
Amanda: I just want to go on the outings. (laughs)
Lee: I know, right? (laughs) But none of the kids have ever gone to any of these outings. It’s always brand new for all of them.
Amanda: Everything’s brand new. Wow.
Lee: Every one, yeah. And so obviously they’re lacking that support in their family. They’ve never been on vacation with anybody, so they don’t have those type of stories or experiences. So kind of neat to see that. This is kind of an overlap with another program that we have called Pro Social Outings, and those are ones we do with probation kids, and so that’s the whole idea going, “Let’s do these.” And so we collected all of this equipment. Businesses have donated all this equipment, mountain bikes and backpacks and hiking poles and fishing gear and snowshoes and just tons of stuff, so we have a whole dry box that’s full of that type of equipment. The mentors and mentees can check those out and go do them themselves, but they can also come on our group outings as well, which is great. So organizations can donate equipment. They can donate money. They can support us by promoting what we’re doing. We have flyers to put up and encourage both kids and mentors for people to apply to be a mentor. Those are the ways that businesses can be a part of that.
Amanda: I think when you can, as a community, as a workplace, take on an organization that you’re going to support, then you get that group think, right? It’s more than the sum of the parts, where you get some people signing up, some people donating, but I think it can be really fun for a community to adopt a program to be with. So yeah, if you have a small business out there that wants to support a program, contact Lee.
Lee: Yes.
Amanda: What’s next for you? You’re still in the early stages and you have your plan for the next few years. But what’s the pie-in-the-sky dream that this program becomes?
Lee: For this program, I’m expecting it to grow significantly. We’re in the 20s right now. I wouldn’t be surprised if it grew to 200. That’ll take a lot of work. We’ll have to hire more staff to run that because there’s monitoring in this. There’s supporting of the mentors. There’s closures for cases. There’s recruitment, all those different components. Training. All those things take a lot of staff time, and so if it gets bigger, we’re going to have to hire more staff, so therefore we need more funds, so we’ll need that. That’s what I expect to happen. I have a great job right now in that I get to not only supervise kids that are on probation and do part of my work there, but I’ve been given the freedom to start some of these new programs or look into them or develop them. I’m hoping to put a lot more supports out there, parenting classes, things like that, that we can help these kids that are struggling, don’t have the support at home, don’t have the skills, that are just kind of lost out there, and therefore they make poor choices. They just make a lot of poor choices or they get in trouble in some way and it just doesn’t turn out well for their future, as well as our society’s future.
Amanda: I love the idea of the family, supporting the entire family, which you started at the beginning by saying that’s the hardest part of your job. Because sometimes I think we have this idea that parents are not doing their job almost on purpose, right? Like they’re just bad parents. I think probably more often than not, what you see is that it’s just these kids who didn’t have any support, they grew up and had their own kids and they don’t know how to be a support because they were never supported.
Lee: Correct, yes.
Amanda: So turning that generational tide around.
Lee: And it takes time, right, for those kids to grow up to be parents. There’s going to be time there. Yeah, so the biggest results will be down the road, absolutely.
Amanda: Well, Lee, I can’t imagine doing the work that you do, but we just are so glad that you’re doing it.
Lee: Thank you.
Amanda: And I hope more and more mentors will come and more businesses will get involved and you’ll get to that 200 just very quickly.
Lee: Yeah. (laughs)
Amanda: And be able to serve more and more kids. As we wrap up, let me ask you our famous last question that we ask everyone.
Lee: Okay.
“We have no idea what people’s backgrounds are, what they’re going through. Even the kids we work with, when you look at them initially, you have no idea that they’ve experienced trauma or are living in a horrible household or anything like that. So to keep that in mind, no matter who you’re seeing, to encourage them in some way is huge. Sometimes as small a thing as a smile or hello is gigantic for kids. Particularly teens, because they don’t feel valued, and when somebody does that, ‘Wow, somebody noticed me. Somebody has given me value.'”
Amanda: If you could have everyone in Seattle do one thing differently tomorrow that would make the world a better place, what would you have all of us do?
Lee: Wow. (laughs)
Amanda: I know it’s a big question.
Lee: It is. It is. My first thought that comes to mind is really to encourage other people. We have no idea what people’s backgrounds are, what they’re going through. Even the kids we work with, when you look at them initially, you have no idea that they’ve experienced trauma or are living in a horrible household or anything like that. So to keep that in mind, no matter who you’re seeing, to encourage them in some way is huge. Sometimes as small a thing as a smile or hello is gigantic for kids. Particularly teens, because they don’t feel valued, and when somebody does that, “Wow, somebody noticed me. Somebody has given me value.” And so if we could have everybody do that, I think that would make a huge difference, just with that simple thing.
Amanda: Amen. Amen to that. Let’s all do that. We will put the link in the bio of this episode, so check out the Lewis County Youth Mentorship Program. And if you’re not in Lewis County, you can still donate to it.
Lee: Yes.
Amanda: All right, Lee, thank you so much for coming.
Lee: Yes, thank you for having me.
Amanda: And thanks for the work you do.
Lee: Yes, thank you.
