High school is a challenging time, especially for students without supportive mentors to look to for help and encouragement.
At Wayne Memorial High School, Wayne County nonprofit organization The Guidance Center is tackling this problem in a novel way: paying students to improve in school. And it’s working.
The program,
Champions of Wayne, pairs students with a volunteer adult mentor who helps them create individualized goals for the semester. If they meet their goals, they are invited to a celebratory banquet and rewarded with a $250 check.
The monetary incentive and personalized goals cater to individual students, encouraging everyone to participate.
Money, mentorship and more
Laura Fuller, who oversees the program as supervisor of The Guidance Center’s School Success Initiative, says this structure makes the program unique compared to more “punitive” approaches that assign mentors to underperforming students.
“Kids that have never passed a class, we set a goal with them, say, pass two classes a semester,” says Fuller. “Then we have kids who have above a 4.0, so we try to introduce individual life goals like doing community service… Success is really whatever it is for that student. There is no pigeonhole.”
Fuller freely admits that many participants “start out for the money,” but it’s their connection with their mentor which keeps them coming back—even when they don’t meet their goals.
“Research has shown that kids who have a mentor have a lot better outcomes,” she says, including higher grades, higher graduation rates and increased community involvement. That’s why The Guidance Center has introduced student-mentor events throughout the year, to “connect the students with the staff and build that sense of community.”
Champions of Wayne was founded in 2008 as an independent nonprofit by school psychologist Bill Gray and metro Detroit entrepreneur and Wayne High alumnus Richard Helppie. Since 2021, it has operated under The Guidance Center, which has provided additional resources to bolster the program.
“We always make it known that we have master-level clinicians in the building,” says Fuller. “We don’t have to just be Champions of Wayne. We can support [students] in other ways.”
The Guidance Center is also working on setting up SEL (Social and Emotional Learning) groups for both students and mentors.
Community buy-in and collaboration breed success
Collaboration between The Guidance Center, Wayne High staff, Champions of Wayne donors, and the community has been integral to the program’s success.
Fuller says the school itself has been “very receptive” to the program, and an advisory group including Wayne High’s principal, The Guidance Center’s CEO, and the program’s primary donors provides insight on how to expand the program and involve the community. Most of its members are Wayne High graduates.
And the program could not function without its nearly 80 mentors. Mentorship is consistently rising, with
about 20 new mentors joining since 2021.
The program has proved its effectiveness in terms of both enrollment and outcomes. In Spring 2024, there were 376 participants compared to
about 30 in 2008, and over half of participants met their goals for the 2023-2024 academic year.
Under The Guidance Center, incentives have become increasingly specialized, expanding the program’s outreach to include students in Career and Technical Education (CTE) and other certificate-based programs.
These goals have helped students whose difficulties extended beyond academic performance.
“We had a student that… I believe was in a certificate of completion program,” says Fuller. “We had a more behavioral goal, as far as his behavior and not being disruptive to the class. And he achieved it overwhelmingly; prior he was being very disruptive and having to be removed from the classroom quite often.”
As she looks to the future, Fuller hopes to continue the program’s upward trajectory. “Our goal is just to get more and more students involved,” she says, “and help them achieve more success.”
She hopes the program will inspire people to be mentors in their own community—because that’s what Champions of Wayne is really about.
“It’s afterwards that [students] are like, ‘oh yeah, that teacher, that mentor, that really helped me. It wasn’t just about the money, it was about having someone that I knew genuinely cared about me,’” says Fuller. “Once they see the quality of what they actually get from it aside from a check, it keeps them coming back.”
This story is part of our Nonprofit Journal Project, an initiative focused on nonprofit leaders and programs across Metro Detroit. This series is made possible with the generous support of our partners, the Ralph C. Wilson Jr. Foundation, Michigan Nonprofit Association and Co.act Detroit.