How a Homeless Teen Became a Mentor and Supervisor for the Nonprofit That Helped Save His Life

“Throughout high school, I had been wavering — part of it due to poverty, and a second part due to family,” Dorsett says. “I had been wavering in and out of staying with family and staying with friends.”

By his senior year, he had “fully left” living with his relatives and was without a permanent home.

“I was no longer with my family, and a friend offered me a place to stay,” Dorsett recalls. “Throughout my first three years of school, it was on and off before completely leaving [my family] the summer going into my senior year. My freshman year, my family had just found a place after being homeless for about a year and a half. But due to poverty and my mom’s eventual unemployment, home was both not safe [or] secure for me to stay.”

One day during his senior year, while still hopping from house to house, Dorsett was introduced to a woman named Shalelia Dillard — founder of the St. Clair Drake Enrichment mentorship program — who wound up changing his life forever.

Like Dorsett, Dillard experienced homelessness as a teen; she also became a Daniels Fund Scholar and graduated from South High School. She used the scholarship money she received from the Daniels Fund to attend Hampton University, a Historically Black College and University in Virginia.

A Denver native, she went on to start the St. Clair Drake Enrichment program in response to her experience as a gifted student.

“I was typically the only one that looked like me in my classes, and I had to deal with a lot of micro-aggression,” Dillard says. “Why aren’t more people who look like me in these programs? It starts to make you believe in negative stereotypes about your people, and that’s not healthy for cultivating positive self-esteem in the BIPOC community.”

Founded in 2018, SCD Enrichment has helped more than 350 students of color in gifted and talented school programs that allow high-schoolers to earn college credit early, including concurrent enrollment, Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate classes.

Dillard says the goal of the program is “to support and recruit Black and brown students in gifted and talented programs and advanced coursework” while also instilling “actual truth about their culture, which is very important.” However, SCD Enrichment has also helped students and their mentors overcome teenage homelessness.

After meeting Dillard his senior year, Dorsett says, he was entered into the SCD Enrichment program, which assisted him in finding a job and finishing school.

“SCD helped me with connections in the community in terms of anybody they knew, and they hired me on to help provide funding so that I was able to be given money to provide for myself after graduating,” Dorsett recalls. “Shalelia had mentioned to me that she had gone through the same thing. … We really connected off of that.”

Fast-forward to 2023, and Dorsett is now an SCD Enrichment mentor himself.

“I’m proud to be a part of the wonderful staff,” he says.

Now 21, Dorsett is SCD Enrichment’s Mentor Program Supervisor — recruiting mentors to help students currently in the program — while also attending Metropolitan State University of Denver, where he’s working toward a bachelor’s degree in education. He says that completing the SCD Enrichment program as a teen and now working there “has been the most crucial step I have taken in my life.

“To be honest, I’m not sure if I would still be here today if it weren’t for this program,” he adds. “Before joining SCD, I never imagined that I would go to college, teach students, have my own place or have access to so many resources and connections. Without SCD, I wouldn’t be the person who makes my mom proud today.”

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Jennifer Chavez, a freshman at the University of Colorado Denver, works with Sabrina Lahlali, a senior at Northfield High School, during an SCD Enrichment class.

Shalelia Dillard

The SCD Enrichment program — named after the twentieth-century Black anthropologist and sociologist — ultimately helps students during school with a class offered as an elective. Class sizes are typically around ten students, and the elective is currently offered at three Denver schools: Northfield High, North High, and the Robert F. Smith STEAM Academy, a charter high school. Teachers of SCD Enrichment classes work directly with the nonprofit, rather than the schools.

SCD Enrichment also runs a summer camp, which was started five years ago and is open to students in grades five through twelve from across Colorado.

Students can either apply to take part in an SCD Enrichment class or be referred by a teacher or parent, but all students can register for the summer camp in Denver. SCD Enrichment has also offered a summer camp in Austin, Texas, for two years.

The elective program and summer camp combine history classes, tutoring and mentorship with visits from professionals of color who share their career paths, but the program offer resources to students outside of the classroom, as well.

Dillard explains that the program selects students they think will succeed in advanced classes by “looking at the assignments that they do, talking to the community, talking to the parents — talking to the teachers and getting recommendations from them in order to say this students is very advanced for their age, and they should be in instruction that is comparable to their intelligence.”

Some of the students are making poor grades or getting into trouble when the program finds them.

“One characteristic of gifted and talented students is to question authority, especially when they have a high understanding of social justice, which is very typical for gifted students,” says Dillard. “We find a lot of those students in the principal’s office. The main point of the program is to find those students and support them, as well as students who are already identified as gifted.”

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Students in an SCD Enrichment class at Northfield High School.

Shalelia Dillard

Part of SCD’s mission is to also help kids and adults experiencing homelessness through its mentorship program. As Dorsett notes, “There was a lot to learn from being homeless.”

For mentors who have already graduated from high school, the Mentor Catalyst program offers support in their personal lives. “It’s a very important part that we give back to the mentors who help with the teaching,” Dorsett says.

The mentor program, which Dorsett supervises, includes classes on coping with mental health issues that could result from homelessness, along with practical resources and tips. The SCD program will even pay for therapy if the mentor lays out a clear plan.

“After that, they’ll be able to write to us about their plan to take care of themselves,” Dorsett says.

In addition, SCD Enrichment partners with various nonprofits — like Joy as Resistance — that support gay and lesbian youth, according to Dorsett. Those connections can help both students and mentors.

“We also have tons of food shelters that we work with, tons of mental health and support workers at schools,” he adds. “So we’ll connect students directly and say, ‘Hey, we have a student that’s talking to us about these problems.'” SCD Enrichment will then work with schools and the counselors to “bridge the gap” and make sure the student “feels sure” about getting help and knowing what they need.

“I often think of how many students are in a situation similar to mine and what SCD could mean to them,” Dorsett says. “The resources I gained along the way have been invaluable, and working for SCD, I hope to have even half the impact on a student’s life that Shalelia and the program have had on me.”