Joel Jimenez - HBO University of Sing Sing

Check out our Beyond The Curve Mentor - Joel Jimenez in the HBO Documentary

"The University of Sing Sing"

"INSIDE THE MENTORING" BY T DARSHAN

Joel Jimenez is the smartest guy in the room who never says too much. His words are communicated in the better volumes of interpersonal speech – he listens, then speaks. Reserved but engaged, agreeable yet assertive, Joel points out his concerns to one of Beyond The Curve's youngest mentoree with candid care.  He does this without agitating his defense or silencing his response. The young man is observant, his attention span decelerating to a pause as if the many loose ends of his purpose were pulling together into a state of clarity. Just how intricate and delicate this balance is, teaching and learning at the same time, boasts no equal in human understanding. The young man's complaints are received and engaged; Joel takes it all in. Watching the conversation go from a cacophony of concerns to new strategies for success, from laundry lists that hamper progress to freshly pressed solutions that outfit a smarter future, captures in one take the manifest of mentorship - a person who needs help and a person who does help coming together to change each others lives.

Joel is tall and pleasant, and plays host to the distinct appearance of your favorite actor in a new Sundance movie. He smiles when I reveal this description of him, only to have this smile sink from visibility in the next instant. His attention turns back to his young mentoree, expressing that the young man may be coming of age before his time. This seems to be the going rate of maturity, I say, but he hastens to disagree. "Every person has a growth-curve and that growth-curve has a pace; every person also has a price to pay when he strays beyond that pace."  Joel's pledge to progress makes it where mentoring is but a course of conduct expected of him. This is seen in the feedback and feel good network of mentorees he inspires but also in the due diligence he practices.

Earning his BA degree in Behavioral Science was a particularly proud moment for him; earning valedictorian of his graduating class was all the more astonishing. "My family was very proud of me and that was very important… one part of it was validating.  Another, more personal part was liberating. And that's what I want to show these young kids – that they're bigger than these walls and better than this place. Sharing it forward is what allows a mentorship relationship to grow."

But does mentoring actually work? Our sensibilities would quicken to say yes: the experienced cultivating the inexperienced, the professor as a beacon of inspiration for the student, it all represents mentoring that fosters real difference for future distinction. How, however, does one quantify such growth and development over time? According to the Markov's process, that depends on the objective. (The) Markov maintained that pursuing a clear objective over the long term will yield close to 100% success for attaining this objective – stay on a straight line and all will fare well. Conversely, there are walls – and more perilously – "gutters" that arise along the way in the short-term. With the right support system, an inmate coming home can manage the many walls he will be bounced off, the obstacle course he will run through. A recourse for being dragged into the gutter is less tractable, let alone clear. This usually entails failure as the ominous endpoint, more specifically prison (again) or death. This is where Joel feels mentoring is pivotal in securing long-term objectives for young men coming home. "These young men typically don't see past short-term outcomes. Developing strategies over the long-term is what mentoring is about, it's what moves success ahead of failure. Trust that you'll be able to measure the success of our (Beyond The Curve) guys in the long run."

What were once ideas are now strategies, much like what were once emotions and now experiences - this marks the big difference between being younger and being older. Putting this into perspective, this Markov mentorship style promotes an exotic but scientifically effective idea – Failure Forgetfulness.  The process holds that "a critical point of future developments depend on the state of things now, not the past." Grounded in this process is the basic architecture of how high-risk young adults can model greater life chances and better life choices – it's forward living for future success. Joel --was just recently featured in HBO's "The University of Sing Sing" documentary --