Making a difference in the real world:
Mentor Greg Hay's story
Greg Hay was working at Microsoft in the 1990s, surrounded by well-to-do young workaholics in a surreal atmosphere of money, power and high-tech abundance. It seemed like a good time to check in with "the real world."
"I'd been to Africa as an undergraduate and saw first-hand how so much of the world lives. Microsoft was so far detached from that kind of reality," Greg recalls. "I wanted some diversity in my life. I wanted a reality check."
He began exploring opportunities for volunteer work with teenagers. Both of his parents were teachers so education was important to him, and Greg had spent several years refereeing kids' basketball games. He looked at many different local organizations, eventually settling on Community for Youth and becoming a mentor.
"Kids are impressionable and inherently good. I'll take the toughest guy in the ninth grade and find the kid in him. And that helps keep the kid in me," he explains.
Today, the 37-year-old software engineer enjoys close ongoing relationships with past students and also mentors several young women and men in his Rainier Beach "family group" at CfY.
"For awhile, it was hard to see if I was really making a difference," says Greg, who's been a mentor for more than six years. "But then, one of my students would ask me a real serious question... and seriously listen to the answer. I'd hear them saying my own language back to me and I thought, 'Wow, I really am having an impact.' To make that kind of difference, that's powerful."
When one of his mentored students - now a college sophomore - referred to Greg as "my dad" and "my best friend," he realized that difference would be long-lasting.
"I like to think the students I spend time with at Community for Youth will be positive individuals, be happy about themselves and be willing to go the extra mile to help someone else someday," the mentor says.
And that's a real world that anyone could enjoy living in.
