Project Uplift: Raising Up Our Children

Raising Up Our Children

Story And Photos By Hannah Lester

Jordan had a whole afternoon to run around the park, play tag, explore the woods and enjoy time with his two friends Hannah Lemel and Braden Laney.

Lemel and Laney are Jordan’s mentors for Project Uplift and once a week they take him, and his cousin Bella, out for fun activities — a visit to the Kreher Preserve and Nature Center, the park, learning to cook or any other fun activities.

Project Uplift has been serving Lee County children since 1973, said Kelley Wells, program coordinator for Project Uplift.

“Project Uplift is a youth-mentoring program that serves the Lee County children between the ages of 5 through 12,” she said. “… The children that we serve are placed on a waitlist to be chosen by mentors. Our mentors work in teams, so the children chosen get two mentors that visit them weekly.

“The purpose, initially, is just to uplift the lives of … the children that we serve and also to prevent their contact with the juvenile court system and we do that by providing them the positive experience of having a mentor.”

Children are referred to the program, often by families who have had children already participate in Project Uplift, Wells said.

DHR, the Lee County schools, the Lee County Youth Development Center and East Alabama Health also all refer children to Project Uplift.

Project Uplift is actually a program of the Lee County Youth Development Center, though its location is on Auburn University’s campus.

Mentors are often pairs of students from Auburn University. That is what Lemel and Laney are. However, mentors do not have to be students, Wells said.

“The mentors actually go through a pretty intensive process to even become a mentor so that can take about three to six weeks, depending on how fast the mentors get their stuff done,” she said.

Mentors then have the opportunity to choose the child they will match with. When visits begin, mentors are encouraged to tutor the child, if that’s necessary.

“But a lot of the visits will just be them taking them to the park for a couple hours, taking them to do something fun,” Wells said. “We do try to keep everything low cost because it’s not about spending money on the child, but spending your time.”

The visits are beneficial for the children.

“We’ve seen a lot of improvement in behaviors and academics, which is what we hope to be even from simple visits,” Wells said.

There are a few mentees who are second or third-generation mentees. Their grandparents were mentees when the program first started, Wells said.

Visits aren’t just uplifting for the children, but the mentors.

“Just about every single mentor that closes out says that they initially started the program to help a child, to gain experience from this, a lot are going into either something in the medical field or education or something they wanted more experience with even working with children, but just about every mentor closes out and says that they gained more from their mentee than they ever thought they would,” Wells said.

Lemel agreed.

“I can’t even begin to say how much it’s benefitted me,” she said. “I think the best thing that I’ve been able to do with these kids is just to laugh and play again.”

Lemel and Laney spend time with Jordan and Bella once a week.

“I had heard about Project Uplift throughout my time at Auburn, they do a really good job of advertising across campus,” Lemel said. “And so I started, I guess the second

semester of my junior year, the spring semester.”

She started with the organization in January of 2021 with a partner other than Laney. But in the fall of 2021, she teamed up with Laney, after her first partner couldn’t make the commitment due to scheduling.

Laney said he started at Auburn during the pandemic and wanted to find some way to get involved.

“I feel like this is a good chance for [Jordan] to get out,” he said. “… getting to see the way that others grow up and are mentored lets me be an example.”

“It’s been really fun for me to get to know these kids and see them every week, it really is the highlight of my week I would definitely say,” Lemel said. “We spend a lot of time outside. We come here a lot, they love [The Kreher Preserve and Nature Center] … they love all the trails, they love to just run and hang out.”

Jordan said his favorite thing to do with Lemel and Laney is just to play.

Lemel and Laney also take Jordan and Bella to the Project Uplift events, like the Valentine’s Day Party or the Fall Festival.

“I think that [Project Uplift] just changes your entire outlook on life,” Lemel said. “Number one, just to hang out with kids, like I said, it just makes life so much less serious and so much less stressful. And then also, just to give kids, who might be less fortunate than you are the opportunity to have a friend in you and see how life, even though it might be different for a lot of people, they can still end up wherever they want to be.

“And also, for the good youth/Auburn connection. I think that at the end of the day, you are someone that they look up to tremendously and so you end up inspiring a lot of who they want to be, or what they want to be when they’re older. So I think just any opportunity to kind of invest in the next generation is something that you should look forward to as a college student and beyond.”

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