This year, Oberlin College students once again entered the community in force, performing public-service programs ranging from food drives to neighborhood cleanups. One student group that seeks to combine College and community in a special way to benefit local children is the Oberlin Mentors.
Mentors see their responsibilities as quite clear-cut.
To this end, mentors and mentees do homework together, play sports, go to the library, and bake cookies. Brockway and Moshenberg, who organized and ran the ExCo class this year, hold weekly meetings with other mentors to discuss their experiences and plan activities for the coming week. The program has also organized several large group projects, the latest being the unfolding of the AIDS Memorial Quilt when it was in Oberlin last fall. Brockway believes that Oberlin Mentors plays a useful role in town-gown relations, but emphasizes the personal nature of the program.