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BAKER'S ANCHOR MENTORING
Baker’s Anchor Mentoring is built on a simple idea: young people do better when they have more caring adults who choose to keep showing up.
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Through Baker’s Anchor, young people are matched with consistent mentors who listen, encourage, challenge, and celebrate them. Together, mentors and mentees share meals, try new things, take on projects, serve their community, and build the kind of trust that only comes with time.
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These relationships are supported by the Youth Development Center, with mentoring experiences taking place right here at the YDC. Some days may be active and full of laughter. Others may simply mean sitting across the table from someone who remembers what you said last week and wants to know how you’re doing.
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Mentors are not expected to have all the answers. They are asked to be present, dependable, and willing to invest in a young person. Because sometimes the most powerful thing an adult can offer is the decision to keep showing up.
Built on Belief
Baker’s Anchor Mentoring carries forward the vision of Tom and Sheila Baker, whose belief in young people and in the power of strong, steady relationships helped lay the foundation for this work.
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Their legacy is not only part of the program’s history. It is reflected in every mentor who chooses to show up, every young person who is given another adult in their corner, and every relationship that has the chance to grow through consistency and trust.
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As we bring Baker’s Anchor back this fall, we are deeply grateful to Dave and Kathy Holliday, whose support is helping make this new cohort possible and giving the YDC the opportunity to carry that vision forward for another generation of young people.
Carrying the Baker Legacy Forward
By giving young people someone who keeps showing up.
The Baker legacy lives on in steady, caring relationships. A mentor who listens, remembers, encourages, and becomes a consistent presence in a young person’s life.
By creating room for confidence to grow.
Through shared experiences, new challenges, conversation, and time together, mentors help young people try new things, build trust in themselves, and discover more of what they are capable of accomplishing.
​By strengthening a young person’s connection to our community.
The impact extends beyond a mentor and mentee. We want young people to feel more connected to the YDC, to the people around them, and to the community they are growing up in.
What Happens When Someone Keeps Showing Up
1 in 3 young people surveyed reported growing up without a mentor.
Baker’s Anchor is one way our community can help close that gap.
Mentoring is not built through one conversation or one perfectly planned activity. It grows when people spend time together, share experiences, and keep coming back.
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Baker’s Anchor creates space for those relationships to take root.
A mentoring evening might mean sharing dinner, cooking together, creating something, playing basketball, working on a service project, trying a new activity, or just talking about how the week has gone.
Share a Meal
Sometimes connection starts around a table.
Try Something New
Confidence grows when someone is beside you saying, “Give it a shot. I’m here.”
Serve Together
Working side by side gives young people a chance to see that they have something meaningful to offer their community, too.
Make Time to Connect
Connection grows when a young person knows there is someone who will listen, remember, encourage, and keep showing up.
Be the person who shows up.
Become a mentor and give a young person something that cannot be bought: your time, your consistency, your encouragement, and another trusted adult in their corner.
Make it possible for others to show up.
Your support helps provide the training, meals, supplies, and shared experiences that give mentors and mentees the time and space to build trust, create memories, and grow together.
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However you choose to be part of Baker’s Anchor, you are helping create the kind of relationships that can stay with a young person long after the program ends.