The Leadership and Mentoring Club is a volunteering club at Malden High School. The club members go to Malden Public Schools like Salemwood and Beebe and coordinate fun activities to do with the entire fourth and fifth grade classes.
The advisor of this program, Mei Hung said that “this program is designed to help high school students learn about themselves and discover the meaning of life”. Heng is not a faculty member at Malden High School, but she is apart of Chinese Culture Connection, a non-profit organization that is an afterschool program that also has summer camps. A Malden High school student went to Hung for help about fifteen years ago and that is when she began helping out in a community service club.
This program is also meant to help out individuals when it’s time to go to college. Being in the program gives high school students an experience of leadership skills that they will need in the near future, or if they ever start or join a club in college. Hung encourages students to “practice leadership skills here and start a club in college and be a leader, then when [they] finish college, [they] already have a dozen skills.”
President of the club, Junior Grace Dong joined her Freshman year. She plans on doing it for all four years of high school. Initially, her brother joined the club and that is when she decided to join as well. Dong talked about how she “enjoy[s] working with the kids and that [she] realized that working with them helped [her] too because now [she is] less shy.” Teaching kids affects Dong because helping others, makes her feels good.
Junior Hien Le, who is the historian of the club, says that when she first attended the club, she was nervous and didn’t know what to do. Luckily one of her best friends were there and she got a hold of herself. Le enjoys this club because she wants to “get to know the kids more and interact with the kids more.”
Tiffany Tran, a preventionist specialist at the Mass Council and Compulsive Gambling, has become involved with the club. Tran is very passionate in helping other people, so this club was a great opportunity for her to get tuned in on the conversation. She found out about this program because of some of the “efforts being made from [her] organization where [they are] trying to reach different places that are serving the Asian American population.” She contacted Hung to see if there was any “collaboration opportunities that would allow [her] to come in and facilitate workshops on problems in gambling and how it impacts the Asian American community specifically”. She’s also working with other youth groups and learning about the work that is being done in terms of leadership and mentorship there. Tran found that the involvement fit perfectly with what she’s trying to do, and explains that “the goal is to try to educate [high school students] and also work with [them] to understand how [they] can develop themselves as young adults.”
This program is supposed to encourage people to find themselves and help others in the process. Hung continues to persist that “[you are] able to help other people individually when you find yourself first.”
