Mentor Match Spotlight: Elesha & Sue
December 24, 2019
As a youth, I was in-and-out of juvenile detention, youth prison, shelters, and foster care. For a long time I believed that I wouldn’t amount to anything meaningful because that’s what some of the people in my life and society told me. When I was in solitary confinement, as a young person, I grew passion for improving prison conditions and reducing mass incarceration. Foolishly, I believed nobody would give me the opportunity to have my voice heard. And that nobody would ever want to hear my voice.
I first met my mentor, Sgt. Sue Lehman, when I was 22 years old and finishing up studying criminal justice studies during my senior year of college. I was working at the jail full-time as a Deputy. Sue was my field training officer, later my supervising Sargent, and in turn became a mentor, friend, and eventually like family.
Sue believed in me when nobody else did. She encouraged me to take risks, to aim big, and would tell me regularly that I should be a Supreme Court Judge or President. I used to think she was just silly and just a kind person but eventually I realized she not only was a kind person she was able to see and reflect my qualities back to me so I could see them too. I started believing anything was possible as well—and stopped seeing each failure as a reason to believe that my past would dictate my future.
I obtained my bachelor’s degree, went on to be a police officer and abolitionist, worked with homeless families and youth, moved across the country, and ended up in Chicago coordinating a youth mentoring program for youth with disabilities, called the Disability Justice Mentoring Collective (DJMC), while also attending law school part time. Many times, like most people in law school, I wanted to give up. Sue, while fighting the symptoms of cancer the past few years, was still present to encourage me, by telling me that people needed to hear my voice, and to never give up!
The mentoring program I was coordinating had been empty with very few enrollees for some time when I took charge. I was unsure how to build a program like this so I turned to the help of MENTOR Illinois and was given steps on how to build a mentor program. DJMC started to grow, and grow, and eventually became at capacity with a waitlist of youth who wanted to be a part of the program. DJMC went on to be awarded as one of the top 10 mentoring programs in the state of Illinois and in 2018 a mentoring match was acknowledged as runner up for the mentoring impact award.
The opportunity to pay it forward was a blessing I will not ever fully be able to put into words. Sue passed away last month and I wish I could tell her right now how I feel about the contributions she made to my life. I hope she knew! Have someone believe in you makes all of the challenges life throws you surmountable.
I am excited that more youth continue to meet their mentors through DJMC and other mentoring programs across the United States. Through these programs, young people can continue to access the encouragement and support that we all need no matter where we come from and what are background stories are.