“At first, I would meet with her because I was required to do it,” Louise remembers, “over time, I really started caring.” Louise believes Emily’s greatest impact has been encouraging her to care about schoolwork, her grades, and eventually, her future.  

By senior year of high school, the two were working on homework as well as college essays and scholarship applications late into the night. 

“She grew into it organically,” Emily says, “she showed an interest in college, and I’m like, ‘great, let’s come up with a spread sheet with 18 different colleges!’” 

Louise is now a junior at Northeastern Illinois University where she studies social work. 

She arrived in Chicago from Uganda with her parents and two brothers in 2016. She has fond memories of visiting RefugeeOne as a child, a place that helped her parents get housing, find jobs, and learn English — while all Louise really remembers is having fun in the Youth Program. “I remember coming with my mom, and I would always love it,” Louise says. “It was definitely fun and such a great place to be.” 

By the time Louise was a teenager, she felt a bit directionless. She didn’t care about her GPA and never considered herself college material. Emily, who’d been slowly building Louise’s skills along with her confidence, saw her differently. “Emily thought I could make it through college; that was great for me.” Louise recalls, “I realized I can do it.”  

With her mentor’s help, Louise recently achieved another major milestone: she became a U.S. citizen. Emily was right by Louise’s side through intense study sessions and nerve-racking interviews downtown, to the citizenship ceremony — and huge sigh of relief! — that followed. 

“I feel like once I got my citizenship, I felt safe. Around the time I was applying, they were doing a lot of deportations, and I was worried,” Louise says. 

With Louise now a citizen and well-established in college, you might think the mentorship would have run its course. Louise continues texting Emily constantly “with the smallest problems” and Emily, with her cool, big-sister vibe, insists she’s always “literally just a phone call away.” 

This mentorship has bound their lives together in a mutually beneficial way, and both women would love to see the dynamic relationship they built replicated as often as possible. “I wish everybody could have mentors,” Louise says.

“It’s an exclusively positive experience to be a stable, supporting adult in this valuable young person’s life,” Emily believes. “If we could do it for everybody, that would be ideal.” 

But you can’t force an indelible bond like this. “It just kind of happens,” Louise says, while Emily appreciates the serendipity of it all. 

“How lucky and wonderful that it happened for us.”