Youth Mentoring Action Network (YMAN) is a youth-centered program that works to prepare young people for life, college, and career. It’s co-founder, Torie Weiston-Serdan is a scholar-practitioner with over 13 years of teaching and youth programming experience. She’s the author of Critical Mentoring: A Practical Guide. Her mentoring philosophy values equity, and centers young people as partners, not the recipients of mentoring. YMAN is successful by all measures—not just because their students have a 100% high school graduation rate, 98% of those students go to college, and of the students who go to college, 100% of them stay in. But more importantly, the students are teachers and partners in the program’s outcomes.

In this episode of In Times Like These, Weiston-Serdan and board member Rocky Bragg help us understand the power of radical constructivism, why relationship always comes first, and how love has the power to free us.