Andy Schindling & Kate Murphy

What if every child had a trained mentor who showed up and stayed?

Andy Schindling and Kate Murphy are building the foundation for the mentoring profession in the United States. A trained, credentialed, and sustainable pathway for adults to become consistent guides in the lives of young people.

About The Fellows

Andy Schindling

Founding CEO, TCP Youth Empowerment

Andy Schindling founded TCP Youth Empowerment after his own life was changed by the absence of consistent guidance. A former Baltimore Orioles minor league pitcher, Andy has spent the last eight years building TCP from a sports-based mentoring effort into a year-round youth development model embedded in schools across northern Anne Arundel County.

TCP now provides in-school academic and emotional mentoring, after-school programs, summer programs, and leadership development for students who benefit from consistent adult support. Its mentors work with students during the school day, helping them navigate academics, behavior, emotional challenges, peer relationships, and the daily work of growing up.

Kate Murphy

Executive Assistant & Co-Fellow, TCP Youth Empowerment

Kate Murphy brings the educator’s lens to this work. With four years of classroom experience, including two years at a low-income Title I school in the Bronx, she understands both what mentorship can do for students and why it must be designed to work inside real school systems.

Together, Andy and Kate are translating TCP’s hands-on experience into a framework that can help mentoring become more than a volunteer role. Their work asks what it would take for mentorship to become a respected profession. One with training, standards, credentials, and staying power.

Why This Work Matters

Mentoring changes lives, but in America it is still too often treated as optional, informal, or volunteer-based.

For young people, that inconsistency matters. A mentor who appears briefly and then disappears can leave a child without the steady relationship they need most. For schools, the need is also clear: teachers and administrators are trying to support students whose challenges often extend far beyond academics, but they do not always have the time, structure, or specialized support to do it alone.

Andy and Kate’s work begins with a different premise: mentorship should be built into the daily life of a child, not left to chance.

Through TCP, they have already seen what happens when trained adults show up consistently. Students receive academic support, emotional guidance, behavioral coaching, and long-term encouragement from adults who know them, believe in them, and remain present over time.

The Bergel Institute is supporting this work because it reflects the kind of field-rooted possibility the Institute was created to pursue: turning a deeply human practice into a serious, scalable model that can improve the lives of children and the adults called to serve them.

The Work

Andy and Kate are working to turn mentorship from something informal and inconsistent into a trained and credentialed profession.

Their work begins with a simple conviction: young people should not have to rely on luck to find an adult who shows up for them. Schools need more than occasional volunteers. Children need consistent guides who are trained to support academic growth, emotional development, behavior, confidence, and character over time.

During the Fellowship year, Andy and Kate will build the foundation for a mentor certification program rooted in TCP Youth Empowerment’s school-based model. They will define the competencies, knowledge, skills, and attributes effective mentors need; develop a training framework; identify curriculum partners; create an implementation budget; and prepare the first pilot cohort.

Their work will also explore what organizational accreditation could look like, so that schools and nonprofits are not only placing mentors in front of students, but building the standards needed for mentoring to work well.

The goal is not simply to create another youth program. It is to build a new pathway for children to receive steady guidance, for adults with lived experience to find meaningful work, and for schools to access trained mentors who can become part of a child’s daily life.

By the end of the Fellowship year, Andy and Kate aim to have a certification framework ready for implementation, a first cohort underway, and a model that can eventually be shared with schools, funders, and mentoring organizations beyond Anne Arundel County.