Why Our Alumni Never Really Leave

We have been in East Palo Alto since 1984, first as Bayshore Christian Ministries and, since 2022, as Hope Horizon East Palo Alto. Forty years is long enough for a strange and wonderful thing to happen: the kids who came to us for homework help have children of their own now. Some of those children come to us too. The math tutor a nine-year-old worked with in the nineties is, sometimes, the reason that same person, now in their thirties, spends a Tuesday afternoon leaning over a table with a kid they've never met, saying try that one again, you almost had it.

People assume the connection ends at the exit. A program runs, a kid ages out, everyone waves goodbye, the end. That is not what we see. What we see is that our alumni never really leave, and after four decades we have some thoughts on why.

What actually sticks when the program ends

If you asked our alumni what they remember, very few would lead with a lesson plan. They remember a person. The counselor who learned their name the first day of camp. The tutor who did not give up when they wanted to. The staff member who noticed they were having a bad week and asked about it, and meant it.

That tracks with what researchers have found about why young people flourish. The Search Institute, which has studied youth development for decades, describes what it calls developmental relationships, the steady bonds through which young people discover who they are and what they can become. The elements are plain: an adult who expresses care, challenges growth, provides support, shares power, and expands a young person's sense of what's possible. Their research finds these relationships are among the strongest forces in whether a kid thrives. And here is the part that matters for alumni: a relationship like that does not have an expiration date printed on it.

A schedule ends. A curriculum gets outgrown. A person who believed in you at nine does not stop mattering when you turn nineteen.

Harvard's Center on the Developing Child makes a related point about the youngest years, describing healthy development as a back-and-forth, a "serve and return" between a child and the caring adults who respond to them. The mechanism doesn't switch off at a certain age. All the way up, people grow through relationships with people who stay. When those relationships are good, we hold onto them. Our alumni hold onto us the way anyone holds onto the people who showed up.

The full circle: mentee becomes mentor

One of the clearest pictures of how the bond outlasts the program is a former camper who comes back years later to tutor, mentor, or join the staff. It is a quiet pattern, and the kind of thing we are proudest of when we see it. Someone who once sat on the receiving end of all that attention grows up, gets some footing, and decides the way to say thank you is to become the adult they needed.

Picture a composite of a story we have watched more than once. A girl comes to camp at eight, shy, not sure she belongs anywhere in particular. She keeps coming back. In high school she volunteers as a junior counselor because she cannot imagine a summer any other way. She goes off to college, the first in her family to do it, and she comes home on breaks and asks if we need hands. A few years later her name is on a staff badge. The kids at her table have no idea that the calm adult helping them was once exactly as unsure as they are. She knows, though. That is why she is so good at it.

This is not sentimentality. It is one of the most efficient things a community can do. When an alumnus comes back to serve, the kid across the table gets a mentor who has walked their exact street, and the alumnus gets to close a loop that was left open in them. Everyone is better for it.

The payoff of those relationships shows up in the research on mentoring too. A national report called The Mentoring Effect found that 76 percent of at-risk young adults who had a mentor aspired to enroll in and graduate from college, compared with 56 percent of those who did not. The same report estimated that about one in three young people grow up without a mentor of any kind. Our alumni who come back are, in the most literal sense, shrinking that number one kid at a time.

Why the college years are when the bond gets tested, and holds

You would think college is where alumni drift. It is often the opposite. For a first-generation college student, and many of ours are the first in their families to go, the hard part isn't only getting in. It is staying in. Federal data from the National Center for Education Statistics has long shown that first-generation students enroll and complete at lower rates than peers whose parents attended college, not for lack of talent but for lack of a map. Nobody at home has done this before, so nobody at home can say exactly what a bursar's hold is, or how to email a professor, or that it is normal to feel lost in October of freshman year.

That is precisely when the old relationship earns its keep. The mentor from high school who now takes the panicked call. The staff member who remembers this student at eleven and can say, with forty years of receipts, you have done harder things than this, keep going. We have 12 students in college on Hope Horizon scholarships in 2026, and the scholarship is only half of it. The other half is that they are still ours, and they know it, and knowing it is sometimes the thing that gets a kid through a semester they wanted to quit.

The ripple you can't fully trace

Here is the honest thing about doing this work for forty years: you never get to see the whole ripple. You see a kid learn to read. You do not always get to see him read to his own daughter twenty years later. You see a shy camper become a junior counselor. You do not always get to see the fifty campers she will one day steady with the calm she learned here. The ripple keeps going past where you can follow it.

But once in a while you get a glimpse. An adult walks back through the door, says it smells the same, and asks how they can help. And you realize the program you thought had a beginning and an end was actually just the first link in something that does not end. That is why our alumni never really leave. We didn't build a program they attended. We built a family they belong to, and belonging, it turns out, is not something you age out of.

Common questions

Why do youth program alumni stay connected for so long?

Because what lasts is not the schedule or the curriculum, it is the relationships. Research from the Search Institute finds that strong, supportive developmental relationships are among the most powerful drivers of a young person thriving, and those bonds don't expire when a student graduates.

What does it mean when a mentee becomes a mentor?

It means the relationship came full circle. A young person who once needed a caring adult grows up and chooses to be that adult for the next kid. Sometimes a tutor, mentor, or staff member first walked in as a student or camper themselves.

Does having a mentor actually change a young person's future?

The evidence is strong. The Mentoring Effect found that 76% of at-risk young adults who had a mentor aspired to enroll in and graduate from college, compared with 56% of those without one. About one in three young people grow up without a mentor.

How can I help a Hope Horizon student stay on the long path?

You can support a scholar. We have 12 students in college on scholarships in 2026, many of them first-generation college students. Your gift helps a young person from East Palo Alto stay enrolled and finish what they started.