ABOVE: Kinship of Martin County Mentor James Tietje, Secretary Sharon Sauer and Executive Director Jen Kahler stand in front of the United Methodist Church at 119 East 2nd St., which they have moved into and now operate out of.

FAIRMONT – With January being National Mentoring Month, Kinship of Martin County is full throttle into a new year of assisting local youth.

Kinship Executive Director Jen Kahler said their mentees range from ages 5 to 19, and can be in the program for any kind of reason.

“Maybe because they’re part of a single-parent household,” she said. “They might have had families that have struggled with substance abuse. It could be a kid who’s gone through bullying in school and needs a little bit of extra support in their life. We know that pretty much anybody can benefit from a mentor.”

The mentoring is done in two ways. One is the one-to-one mentoring where a mentor is paired up with a mentee. This is the biggest part of Kinship’s mentoring operations and has the most history. James Tietje has been in this program with a mentor since 2023. However, his knowledge of the program goes much further back, to his old boss.

“Greg Brolsma is the former chief of police, heavily involved in Kinship,” Tietje said. “This is 20 years ago, when I was a brand new young guy returning to Fairmont. He’d asked me about Kinship. I was a young guy, I didn’t have kids, and when you’re young, and you don’t have kids, you’re like, ‘What am I gonna do?’ I kind of shied away from it.”

After several years and having had kids of his own, Tietje decided to take the leap after being reintroduced to Kinship.

“I was talking to a friend one day, and he had brought up Kinship and was like, ‘Yeah, I’ve been thinking about getting into mentoring,'” he said. “I was like, ‘You know what? I’ve been putting this off for probably 20 years.’ That day I went home, and I put in my online application.”

Today, Tietje said it wasn’t as worrisome as he had envisioned it 20 years ago.

“It’s something fun that I’ve gotten into,” he said. “Connecting with my mentee and realizing it’s really not a difficult process to go through. There’s so many events that Kinship presents you with, whether it’s zip lining or bowling. You don’t have to come up with everything on your own.”

In the last few years, Kinship has also initiated a “Boost” program for mentees who perform better in a group setting rather than a one-to-one match.

“It still gives them a chance to work on social skills,” Kahler said. “It still gives them a chance to get a lot of the kinds of community resources that Kinship helps provide. It also gives us a chance, because every now and again, one of those kids who might have come into Kinship thinking a one-to-one mentor wouldn’t be possible for them, maybe we decide it’s okay for them to be matched, and they get a chance to be a part of that.”

Currently, Kinship has 46 one-to-one matches and approximately 30 children from all over the county in the Boost program.

Last year was a funding year for Kinship, as they applied for and received four large grants to help them continue to grow their mentoring programs. For 2026, Kahler said they will be full throttle on doing just that.

“Definitely diving back into mentor recruitment,” she said. “We were fortunate to mostly hold steady with our mentor and mentee matches over the course of the year, but we’re actually in the process right now of matching two new mentors.”

They will be doing so from a new location this year. Unfortunately, the Kinship house at 206 West 3rd Street was no longer able to be used.

“We found out the roof needed some repairs that we didn’t have the ability to take care of as quickly as we would have needed to, and would have required a lot of big pieces to fall into place at the same time,” Kahler said. “Rather than spending a lot of extra time fundraising on top of what we already knew we needed to do, we started looking for other locations to be a place for us to have our office space.”

Kinship will be operating for the foreseeable future at the United Methodist Church on 119 East 2nd Street. Kahler said the move has gone well, and they are excited for what’s next.

“The process took quite a while,” she said. “We had a lot of help from different organizations that helped us move some of the big things. The United Methodist Church has been great as a new host for our program.”

For more information, call 507-238-4440 or visit facebook.com/kinshipofmartincounty/.