Jan. 18, 2026

I was wrapping up an interview with Police Chief Jon Thum recently when I asked one of my go-to questions.

“Anything else going on we should get on our radar?”

There were a few things, and then he kind of paused and sighed. He had spoken to a group of up-and-coming leaders recently and struggled not to vent.

“I didn’t take a super-negative tone … but it’s absolutely an indictment,” he said.

Here’s what happened. To start the year, a group of community mentoring organizations had tried to find mentors for kids at Anne Sullivan, Cleveland and Terry Redlin elementary schools.

At the beginning of the 2025-26 school year, there were more than 1,000 mentors serving Sioux Falls School District students, yet only about 50 were matched in these three schools combined.

“We wanted 75. We got 36,” Thum said. “We have over 80 kids on a waitlist on one school alone. I can only get 36 mentors to show up. That’s a failure for us as a community.”

The same week, I got a message from Nick Ovenden, president of GreatLIFE Golf & Fitness, which is a key supporter of the TeamMates school-based mentoring program in Sioux Falls.

“We’re looking at helping get mentors out to JFK, Hayward and Oscar Howe the rest of the school year,” he said. “Do you have any ideas of people or businesses?”

I sent suggestions, then checked in with him a few days ago. Like the effort Thum mentioned, “we have a long way to go,” Ovenden said. “We’re doing what we can do to be able to recruit and get people in.”

He has mentored a student who now is in high school since the student was in fourth grade. Every week, they spend about an hour during the school day together, usually over lunch and play a card game or take a walk.

“It’s been really cool to foster that,” he said. “To walk through these major changes with him has been really cool for me to watch from the outside, but I didn’t realize the impact.”

Mentorship isn’t about assisting a child in crisis, he explained. They’ve maybe had “five honest talks in five years — those hard conversations,” he said. “You’re not the parent, and it’s a whole different dynamic. People need it, and kids really, really need it.”

Because we have multiple opportunities to mentor in this community, there likely is going to be a scenario that works for you or your team members. Ovenden met with one elementary school principal who offered to facilitate mentor time as early as 7:30 a.m. and up until 6 p.m. Often, mentors will go to schools over a lunch hour. The key is consistency, generally connecting with a student weekly.

“I think the answer is to get the business community to say, ‘I’ll give you an extra 20 minutes on your lunch,’ or ‘I’ll say as a business, this is part of our culture. This is who we are,'” Thum said.

Because I write for so many business leaders, I felt it was important for you to hear this. Some businesses already make mentoring a team effort, and I’ve seen powerful examples of companies “adopting” schools with many employees mentoring. It generates significant employee engagement, but it also makes a critical difference in the community. We are an incredibly generous business community when it comes to our resources. We need to foster the same culture when it comes to giving our time.

The impacts are statistically significant, from students with mentors having a greater likelihood to pursue post-secondary education to improved school attendance and reduced risk for drug and alcohol use.

I also realize this isn’t a fit for everyone at every stage in life. I would love to commit to mentoring, but I often am out of town and can’t say with certainty I’m able to be in a classroom most weeks, so it’s not fair to a student who should have that frequency.

Instead, for almost a decade, I’ve “adopted” a classroom of elementary school students through a program from the nonprofit Promising Futures that provides every student a free book each month of the school year, plus some over the summer.

I visit the students multiple times a year, read to them and do a Q&A where we talk about school, Sioux Falls, Halloween costumes, summer break and why I think it’s so important they learn to love reading. I started in kindergarten with my current third-graders. Many of them now remember me and are excited to catch me up on their lives.

I signed up as soon as I heard Promising Futures was offering this, and I remember telling founder Steve Hildebrand it didn’t matter which school I was assigned. It just came at a time I felt frustrated with the overall tone and direction of the world around me, and I said something like, “At least this allows me to do something.”

No surprise, he didn’t miss a beat in replying: “So, then, how about Rosa Parks Elementary?” Done.

It felt fitting to mention this ahead of Martin Luther King Jr. Day, which is designated as a national day of service. If you find yourself wishing the world felt headed in a different direction, consider helping promote a positive direction for one child.

As Thum said in calling for more mentors: “That person is you. It is not somebody else who needs to step up in the life of a young person in our community.”

If you haven’t been in a school much, or lately, don’t be deterred. These programs are well-established, and the kids are prepared for what mentoring is about. You’ll be given tools to help, too, but so much of this is just about showing up and giving your time.

“It gets you out of the day-to-day routine and gives me a different perspective,” Ovenden added. “He doesn’t care something happened at work. He cares I showed up and am giving attention. It gives me perspective about what’s important. The little things that might have been bothering me usually go away.”

It’s a different relationship from the one he has with his own daughters, he added.

“I don’t have to be the dad,” he said. “And I want mentors for my daughters, and they keep asking me for mentors. I’m like, ‘We’re trying to find mentors for a lot of kids, girls.'”

If you’d like to learn more, there are a lot of resources. There are tours scheduled at Anne Sullivan Elementary at 9 a.m. Jan. 20 and Cleveland Elementary at 9 a.m. Jan. 30. To RSVP to the tours or for information on mentoring, call 211. You also can learn more online here.

To connect with TeamMates mentoring, click here or email me at jodi@siouxfalls.business, and I’ll get you connected.

To connect with LSS, also part of the community-wide effort, click here.

If you’d like to learn more about Promising Futures and its efforts to create equity for kids in poverty, click here.