Midtown Education Foundation Earns Gold Star

The Illinois Mentoring Partnership (IMP) recognizes the importance of mentoring in children’s lives. They support and assist over 200 different youth mentoring programs that are currently operating in Illinois. IMP achieves this by helping to ensure that the programs meet the best standards possible, while at the same time helping them find different mentors and the support necessary for best serving the needs of the children.  

Jerry Shepherd, Margie Morris, Cristy Acosta, Erin Aldrich and Glenn Wilke, as MEF accepts the awards from Morris, IMP's Executive Director.

Midtown Educational Foundation recently received an outstanding honor from IMP. MEF, Midtown Center for boys, and Metro Achievement Center for girls all received The Gold Star Mentoring Program Award, which is a part of IMP’s commitment to high quality mentoring. The award is granted to the mentoring programs that meet or exceed expectations across six different program areas. These six areas are determined by The National Mentoring Partnership, and include recruitment (mentor and mentee), screening (mentor and mentee), training, matching, monitoring and support, and match closure.

Receiving these awards was a great honor for MEF, Midtown, and Metro, especially since MEF’s own Executive Director, Glenn Wilke, serves on the program leadership council for IMP. Margie Morris, the Executive Director of the Illinois Mentoring Partnership, presented all three awards on November 3rd at the Board of Directors meeting.  Overall, this was an exciting accomplishment for MEF as a whole, since the goal is for the programs to grow and excel even further in the future.

by Katie Morgan, MEF Marketing Intern