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United Way Blog

United Way Joins First Lady, Education Leaders in Corporate Mentoring Challenge

United Way Joins First Lady, Education Leaders in Corporate Mentoring Challenge

Tuesday, January 25th, United Way’s Peter Hahn — along with his third-grade mentee, Anthony — joined the First Lady and some of the biggest names in education to talk about what we can all do to cut by half the number of young people who drop out of high school.

Michelle Obama, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, Attorney General Eric Holder, Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius, and leaders from a number of national nonprofits and service organizations gathered this afternoon for the National Mentoring Summit in Washington, D.C. Hosted by one of our partners, MENTOR, the goal of the summit is to help organizations combine their strengths and develop strategies for using youth mentoring programs to boost academic achievement.

To start things off, Obama proposed The Corporate Mentoring Challenge. It’s a call for U.S. companies to launch new mentoring programs, expand existing employee mentoring programs, and provide resources to support local mentoring programs that help youth gain leadership skills, achieve their educational goals, and increase their confidence. A few of our corporate partners already plan to answer the call — Bank of America, Deloitte, and AT&T among them — and United Way will be working hard in the months ahead to help channel this Live United spirit into schools and communities across America.

We’ve seen the power of mentoring and one-on-one tutoring first-hand, and we applaud the First Lady for voicing this much-needed initiative. To learn more about our work in education, and find out what you can do to help, click here.