Mentoring as a Systemic Intervention: The Center for Black Male Mentoring

What happens when we stop asking, “What is wrong with this young person?” and instead ask, “Who and what surrounds this young person, and how can we strengthen those connections?”

This is one of the fundamental shifts of systemic family therapy—and it is one reason the Center for Black Male Mentoring is such an important community resource for Philadelphia and all of Pennsylvania black male youth

The Center for Black Male Mentoring is a Philadelphia-based nonprofit dedicated to educating, elevating, and empowering young people and their caregivers through mentoring, leadership development, family support, and community engagement. Its programs are designed to provide youth and families with substantive resources and supportive environments where young people can learn, grow, and thrive.

From an Ecosystemic Structural Family Therapy (ESFT) perspective, this work represents something much larger than mentoring.

A Young Person Is Never Just an Individual

Systemic therapists understand that children and adolescents are embedded within multiple interconnected systems. Their development is influenced by caregivers, siblings, extended family, peers, schools, neighborhoods, faith communities, mentors, and broader social and cultural environments.

When a young person is struggling, our assessment therefore cannot stop with the individual.

We have to ask:

Who is connected to this young person?

Who believes in them?

Who believes in their caregivers/support people?

Who sees their strengths?

Where do they experience belonging?

Where do they experience opportunity?

Where are the gaps?

Mentoring can become a powerful intervention when it expands the young person’s ecosystem.

The Center for Black Male Mentoring provides opportunities for young people to develop relationships with mentors and community leaders while participating in leadership, entrepreneurship, STEM, and other developmental experiences. Its programs include the Saturday Leadership Academy and Parent Academy, as well as the Minority Entrepreneurial Apprenticeship Program.

That is systemic work.

Strengthening the Ecosystem

In ESFT, we often use an Ecomap to understand the relationships and resources surrounding a family. We are not simply looking for problems. We are looking for potential sources of connection, strength, protection, and opportunity.

A mentor can become one of those connections.

Youth Academy

For a young person who feels disconnected from school, a mentor may provide another pathway to engagement. For a young person who struggles to see a future for themselves, exposure to successful adults and new career possibilities can broaden their sense of what is possible. For caregivers who feel uncertain about how to support their child’s development, parent-focused programming can create another source of knowledge and community.

Parent Academy

The Center’s Parent Academy is particularly interesting from this perspective because it explicitly recognizes that supporting young people also means supporting the adults around them. The organization describes the program as helping parents and guardians develop parenting skills while supporting their children as they navigate the challenges of today’s world.

This is an important systemic principle:

We don’t strengthen children by working only with children. We strengthen the systems in which children develop.

From Individual Success to Community Connection

Another reason the Center is such a valuable resource is its emphasis on community.

Its mission extends beyond individual youth to their families and the broader regional community. The organization describes its work as creating safe and supportive environments while providing opportunities for young people to become leaders and positive role models.

That creates an important feedback loop. A young person experiences connection → develops competence → experiences success → develops confidence → becomes more connected to others → begins contributing to the community.

The community then becomes part of the young person’s developmental support system. From a systemic perspective, this is not simply an outcome. The relationship itself is an intervention.

A Resource for Therapists

For systemic family therapists, organizations like the Center for Black Male Mentoring can become important natural supports within treatment.

Rather than positioning therapy as the family’s only source of change, therapists can ask:

Who else can be part of this family’s village?

Where can this young person experience competence?

Who can see something in this young person that they may not yet see in themselves?

What relationships can we strengthen that will continue after therapy ends?

These questions move us away from a treatment model in which the therapist becomes the primary source of change and toward a model in which the therapist helps families build sustainable networks of support. That is particularly important as families prepare for discharge. The goal is not for the family to remain dependent upon the therapist. The goal is to strengthen the family’s ecosystem so that the relationships, resources, and competencies developed during treatment can continue beyond therapy.

Building Villages, Not Just Treating Symptoms

The Center for Black Male Mentoring reminds us that sometimes the most powerful intervention is not another clinical technique.

Sometimes it is connection.

Connection to a mentor.

Connection to a parent who feels more equipped.

Connection to a career possibility.

Connection to a community.

Connection to someone who says, “I see something in you.”

For ESFT clinicians, this is an important reminder that our work extends beyond the therapy room. When we assess the family’s social ecology, we should actively look for organizations and community relationships that can help families build the lives they want.

The Center for Black Male Mentoring is one of those resources in Philadelphia. We encourage clinicians, educators, supervisors, caregivers, and community members to learn more about their programs and consider how this organization might become part of the village surrounding the young people and families they serve.

Sometimes changing the system begins by helping someone find a new person in their system.

Learn more about the Center for Black Male Mentoring and explore the programs and opportunities available to youth and families.

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One of the greatest misconceptions about systemic family therapy is that therapists must choose between changing behavior or changing relationships. In reality, effective systemic therapy requires both first-order (behavioral) and second-order change (relational). The question is not whether we use each type of change, but when, why, and how we use them.

From an Ecosystemic Structural Family Therapy (ESFT) perspective, these two forms of change are complementary, not competing. The therapist’s task is to understand which type of change is needed at a particular moment and to intervene intentionally.

First-Order Change:

First-order change refers to behavioral changes within the existing relational framework. The current beliefs, assumptions, and organization of the family remain intact, but the interactions begin to look different.

Examples include:

• A caregiver begins using a new parenting strategy.
• Family members reduce the frequency of arguments.
• A youth begins attending school more consistently.
• Parents implement a new bedtime routine.
• A family develops a safety plan during times of crisis.

These changes are valuable. They often reduce immediate distress, increase safety, and create opportunities for new experiences. In many situations—particularly when there is risk, instability, or crisis—first-order change is essential. However, behavioral changes alone do not necessarily alter the family’s understanding of themselves or one another.

Without a deeper shift in meaning, new behaviors are difficult to sustain. Under stress, families often return to familiar interactional patterns because the framework organizing those relationships has not changed.

Second-Order Change: Changing the Framework

Second-order change occurs when the family transforms how they understands the problem they are facing and organizes itself. Rather than simply behaving differently, family members begin making meaning differently. How they think, feel, relate is all informed by the new meaning making; a new framework now guides the way people relate. Hence the importance of REFRAMING!

A caregiver who once viewed their teenager as “defiant” may begin seeing behaviors as attempts to communicate fear, shame, or disconnection. A parent who believed asking for help was a sign of failure may begin understanding that accepting support is an act of leadership. A family that viewed conflict as evidence of failure may begin seeing conflict as an opportunity for repair and deeper connection. These shifts reorganize the entire system. When meaning changes, behavior often follows naturally because family members are no longer responding from the same assumptions that previously maintained the problem.

Why ESFT Leads with Second-Order Change

In ESFT, therapists intentionally lead with second-order change. This does not mean behavior is unimportant. It means behavior is understood within a broader relational context. Rather than asking, “How do I stop this behavior?” the therapist asks, “What framework currently makes this behavior understandable?” (MAKE THE BEHAVIOR MAKE SENSE IN CONTEXT).

By first helping families reorganize how they understand themselves, each other, and the problem, behavioral interventions become far more meaningful and sustainable. The therapist is not simply teaching a new skill. The therapist is helping create conditions in which the family naturally begins relating differently.

Pulling in First-Order Change Intentionally

Leading with second-order change does not mean ignoring behavior. There are many moments when deliberate first-order interventions are both necessary and ethically responsible. A therapist may coach caregivers through de-escalation strategies when safety is at risk. A family may develop routines that increase predictability for a child with developmental needs. Parents may practice co-regulation techniques or communication skills during enactments.

These behavioral interventions are not used because therapists believe behavior alone creates lasting change. They are used intentionally because they support, reinforce, or create opportunities for deeper relational transformation towards the positive interactional pattern. In ESFT, first-order change serves second-order change.

The Therapist Is the Agent of Intervention

This distinction also reshapes how therapists understand their own role. One of the core convictions of ESFT is that the therapist is the agent of intervention—not the agent of change. Therapists cannot make families trust one another. They cannot create attachment. They cannot force insight or manufacture hope. All of this has to come from the family itself.

What therapists can do is introduce interventions that create opportunities for the family to experience themselves differently. Joining, reframing, enacting and anchoring, as well as, family assessment tools, and deliberate engagement with the family’s social ecology all invite the system to reorganize itself. The family remains the true agent of change.

A More Intentional Way of Thinking

Therapists sometimes become stuck when they focus exclusively on either behavior or insight. If we only pursue first-order change, families may leave treatment with better coping skills but the same organizing beliefs that maintained the problem. If we only pursue second-order conversations without helping families practice new ways of interacting, meaningful insights may never become lived experiences. ESFT invites a more integrated approach.

Lead with second-order change. Help families develop a new framework for understanding themselves and one another. Then intentionally introduce first-order interventions that allow those new understandings to be practiced, strengthened, and generalized across everyday life.

This is where lasting transformation occurs. Not because the therapist changed the family. But because the therapist created opportunities for the family to change itself. That is the power of systemic family therapy.

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Family stories often contain important information that has never been spoken aloud.

In ESFT, the Genogram is more than a family tree. It is a tool for understanding patterns, relationships, and family culture is transmitted across generations. When working with LGBTQ+ youth and their families, the Genogram can uncover powerful insights that help explain current fears, conflicts, and opportunities for support.

Consider a young person who expresses significant anxiety about sharing their gender identity with a parent. A systemic assessment will offer the therapist insight into how that fear makes perfect sense within the family’s culture and history.

One family discovered during a Genogram exercise that the father had cut off contact with a transgender sibling many years earlier. Suddenly, the youth’s anxiety was no longer a mystery. Their fear was grounded in observable family experience.

At the same time, the Genogram revealed something equally important: while the father had severed the relationship, the grandparents had maintained theirs. This discovery challenged and highlighted additional sources of support within the family system.

Through an ESFT lens, symptoms are often connected to relational realities. Fear, anxiety, secrecy, and withdrawal frequently emerge in response to family rules, expectations, and experiences.

The Genogram allows therapists and families to ask important questions:

• How have differences been treated in this family?
• What happens when someone challenges family beliefs?
• Which relationships are characterized by connection?
• Which relationships are organized around distance or cutoffs?
• Where do exceptions to the family rules exist?

These conversations help families move from assumptions to understanding.

Often, the goal is not simply to identify barriers but to uncover strengths and resources that already exist within the system. Understanding family history creates opportunities for building new patterns of connection.

Sometimes the Genogram reveals that the future may not be as predetermined as it once seemed.

Critical Events Timeline

A common experiences reported by caregivers when a child comes out is the feeling that the information appeared suddenly. For the youth, however, the experience is often very different.

Many LGBTQ+ young people have spent months or years exploring, questioning, understanding, and making meaning of their identity long before they share it with others. As a result, parents and caregivers may feel as though they have just started a journey that their child has already been traveling for a long time.

This discrepancy can create confusion, fear, and disconnection.

The Critical Events Timeline is a family assessment tool used by ESFT practitioners that helps bridge this gap. For example, having the caregiver and youth create separate timelines. The youth maps their internal journey, while the caregiver reflects on memories and experiences they now see differently in hindsight. When the timelines are shared, families often discover a deeper understanding of one another. The therapist should make sure that they are aware of psychological and physical safety challenges that could arise due to this exercise.

Example two, a youth identified multiple stages in their gender journey, including different periods when they internally experimented with names and pronouns before ever discussing them with family members. They also identified important milestones such as confiding in a cousin and later sharing their identity with their mother. Meanwhile, the mother reflected on experiences she had not fully understood at the time. Looking back, she recognized signs she had missed and gained a richer appreciation for her child’s journey.

The result was not merely increased information—it was increased connection.

Through an ESFT lens, timelines help families enact meaning together. They transform what can feel like a sudden revelation into a coherent story. They highlight resilience, growth, courage, and the many steps that led to the present moment. Perhaps most importantly, timelines help families shift from “How did this happen?” to “Help me understand your journey.” That shift often becomes the foundation for deeper empathy, stronger attachment, and a more collaborative path forward.

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Using the Person of the Therapist to Understand the Isomorphic Process

One of the most challenging and rewarding aspects of becoming a systemic family therapist is learning that the work is not just about understanding families—it is also about understanding ourselves.

In Ecosystemic Structural Family Therapy (ESFT), therapists are trained to observe patterns, identify interactional processes, and make meaning of symptoms within the broader social ecology. Yet one of the most important members of systems in the room is often overlooked: the therapist.

As clinicians work toward competence they inevitably encounter their zone of proximal development, or what many ESFT trainers refer to as a “growth edge.” A growth edge represents the space between what a therapist can comfortably do and what they are still learning to do. It is often where discomfort, uncertainty, and self-doubt emerge. Importantly, it is also where meaningful professional development occurs.

The challenge is that growth edges frequently activate what ESFT would describe as fast thinking. Faced with uncertainty, therapists may become more focused on reducing their own anxiety than on remaining curious about the family’s experience. Rather than following the model, they may move toward self-soothing behaviors such as over-advising, over-teaching, rescuing, withdrawing, becoming overly rigid, seeking compliance, or avoiding difficult conversations altogether.

From an ESFT perspective, these moments are not failures. They are data.

This is where Harry Aponte’s Person of the Therapist (POTT) model offers an invaluable framework. Aponte proposed that therapists must continually examine how their own life experiences, vulnerabilities, strengths, and unfinished emotional business enter the therapeutic relationship. Rather than attempting to eliminate these influences, therapists learn to understand and use them intentionally in service of the family.

Aponte identified six recurring themes that often emerge in the lives of therapists and the families they serve:

• Fear of Rejection / Abandonment: “I will not be accepted”
• Feelings of Inadequacy / Low Self-Esteem: “I am not enough”
• Need for Control: “I must keep control or else”
• Fear of Vulnerability: “don’t show emotions”
• Codependency / People-Pleasing: “meet others’ needs at the expense of my own”
• Trust Issues: “hold the reigns tight so you don’t get hurt”

While different authors and trainers may organize these themes somewhat differently, the central principle remains the same: therapists are often affected by the very struggles they encounter in the families they serve.

When viewed through an ESFT lens, these themes frequently reveal themselves through the isomorphic process.

The isomorphic process occurs when interactional patterns present in the family begin to appear elsewhere in the system—including supervision, teams, organizations, and even within the therapist. A therapist working with a family struggling with criticism may notice becoming self-critical. A therapist working with an avoidant caregiver may find themselves avoiding difficult conversations. A therapist working with a family organized around rescuing may suddenly feel compelled to rescue the identified client.

The therapist’s activation becomes information about the system.

The key distinction is that ESFT does not encourage therapists to focus on themselves for their own benefit during treatment. Instead, self-awareness is used to better understand what is happening in the family. The therapist’s internal experience becomes another assessment tool.

When therapists understand their growth edges, they become better able to recognize when they are drifting away from the model and toward self-protection. They learn to ask:

• What is being evoked in me right now?
• What am I feeling compelled to do?
  • Would that intervention help the family or just reduce my own discomfort?
  • What might my own reaction teach me about the family’s experience?

These questions transform therapist activation into clinical information.

Over time, therapists develop greater capacity to tolerate uncertainty, maintain curiosity, and remain connected to the family even during difficult moments. They learn that the goal is not to avoid activation but to recognize it, understand it, and use it in service of treatment.

Ultimately, ESFT teaches that the therapist is both an instrument of change and a participant in the system. Growth occurs when clinicians learn to work at the edge of their competence while remaining grounded in the model. The Person of the Therapist framework provides a roadmap for understanding how our own experiences influence our work, while the concept of isomorphism helps us recognize that what is happening inside of us may be reflecting what is happening within the family.

When used thoughtfully, these moments become opportunities—not obstacles. They help therapists strengthen their capacity to join, assess, understand, and respond. In doing so, they move closer to the ultimate goal of ESFT: using every part of the system, including ourselves, in service of healing and lasting relational change.

Any time you have a traumatized child, you have a traumatized family.
Any time you have a traumatized family, you have a traumatized community.

From an Ecosystemic Structural Family Therapy (ESFT) perspective, the interconnectedness of trauma is not just a metaphor—it’s a lived reality. Trauma doesn’t reside in one person alone. When a child exhibits symptoms of trauma—such as dysregulation, withdrawal, aggression, or anxiety—it’s easy to focus solely on the child. However, ESFT asks us to broaden our view. Trauma is embedded within relationships, shaped by caregiver responses, family stressors, historical and generational experiences, and the community context. When we recognize a traumatized child, we also acknowledge that caregivers may be overwhelmed, fearful, or uncertain, families are adapting under stress without adequate support, and the larger network may be strained or under-resourced.

The family serves as the immediate system, and trauma has the power to reorganize it. This disruption can affect attachment (the sense of safety between caregiver and child), parental leadership (confidence, consistency, authority), co-regulation (the shared ability to manage distress), and co-caregiver alliance (alignment between adults). Caregivers may become more reactive, protective, or distant—not out of indifference, but because they too are affected. The child’s symptoms often reflect a system under stress, not just an individual problem.

ESFT expands this perspective even further, recognizing families as part of a larger social ecology—including schools, neighborhoods, cultural beliefs, healthcare systems, and economic conditions. When communities face violence, poverty, systemic inequities, or limited access to resources, families absorb those pressures. Consequently, children are deeply impacted by the strain their families experience. Trauma becomes layered and interconnected: community stress influences family functioning, family stress impacts child behavior, and the focus frequently lands on the child, without addressing the broader system.

Rather than asking, “What’s wrong with this child?” ESFT encourages us to ask, “What has this child, this family, and this community experienced—and how is that showing up here?” This shift promotes understanding over blame, emphasizes relational patterns instead of individual pathology, and aims for systemic change rather than simply reducing symptoms.

Although this perspective can feel overwhelming, it clarifies where meaningful intervention begins. We don’t have to “fix” the entire community to create change. Instead, we focus on strengthening caregiver capacity, increasing safe and consistent connections within the family, supporting co-regulation and relational repair, and helping families access community supports. When a family begins to shift, there’s a ripple effect—the child feels safer, family interactions improve, and community engagement changes.

This approach also places responsibility on clinicians, organizations, and systems of care. If trauma exists across multiple levels, healing must occur across those levels as well. Trauma-informed care should extend beyond the individual, interventions must account for family and ecological context, and systems need to collaborate rather than operate in isolation.

A traumatized child is never just a traumatized child; they are part of a family striving to adapt, and that family is embedded within a community facing its own challenges. Within this complex web lies both the source of the problem and the pathway to healing. In ESFT, change does not occur in isolation—it happens when we begin to see and support the system as a whole.

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Looking Beyond the Individual

In clinical practice, it is common for families to enter treatment with a clearly identified concern—“fix my child.” The referral behaviors consist of “defiance, tantruming, hurting self and others…and not listening to me…” The family will report, the child is diagnosed with ADHD.

Now folks, ADHD is a constellation of symptoms, these are the measurable constructs that signal how this child’s brain navigates the day to day. However, the focus quickly narrows to how those symptoms show up: impulsivity, inattention, difficulty regulating behavior.

But from an Ecosystemic Structural Family Therapy (ESFT) perspective, this is only the starting point—not the full picture.

A systemic family therapist is always asking a broader question:

Is the referral behavior an individual-based challenge, or is it organized within the family system?

The Individual Within the System

Systems theory reminds us that individuals do not exist in isolation. Every person is embedded within a biological network of relationships, environments, and experiences that shape how behaviors are developed and maintained.

So while a diagnosis like ADHD may accurately describe a constellation of symptoms, ESFT invites us to look beyond the individual and ask:

• Who is involved in this pattern?
• What interactions are maintaining it?
• Where is this behavior occurring—and where is it not?

This shift moves us from a symptom-focused lens to a contextual, developmental, relational and trauma informed understanding.

Expanding the Assessment: The Role of Social Ecology

In ESFT, understanding the family system means understanding the social ecology surrounding it. The therapist is not only observing behavior but also gathering information about the conditions that shape the family’s functioning.

We begin to ask:

• Is there food insecurity or housing instability impacting daily routines?
• Are there challenges related to income instability or access to resources?
• What adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) are present across generations?
• Is the family navigating acute stress, medical concerns, or trauma exposure?
• Are there generational patterns of mental health needs that resulted in developmental trauma and inform current functioning?

These factors are not secondary—they are central to understanding how the family “got here.” BOTH their story of dislocation and their story of resiliency and strengths.

Community and Cultural Context Matter

ESFT also widens the lens beyond the household to include the community and cultural environment.

• What are the beliefs within the family’s community about behavioral or mental health challenges? How does this influence who this family turns to?
• How do schools, healthcare providers, and other systems respond to this family?
• Are supports experienced as helpful, judgmental, or inaccessible?
• Generationally what are the experiences of formal and informal supports?

The way a community interprets and responds to behavior can either reinforce distress or support change.

For example, if a child’s behavior is consistently labeled as “defiant” without consideration of context, the family may feel blamed or misunderstood. This can increase stress, reduce engagement with supports, and intensify the pattern.

From Blame to Understanding

When we focus only on the identified client, we will place pressure on one individual to “fix” the problem. ESFT challenges this by reframing behavior as part of a larger interactional system.

This does not dismiss individual needs—it situates them within context.

A child’s difficulty with attention and regulation may be influenced by:

• Environmental instability
• Caregiver stress or overwhelm
• Inconsistent routines shaped by external pressures
• Limited access to supportive resources

Understanding these factors allows the therapist to move from blame to curiosity, and from symptom management to systemic intervention.

Why This Matters for Change

When we understand referral behavior systemically, the pathway for intervention expands.

Instead of asking, “How do we fix this child?”, we begin asking:

• What strengths do we already have we can use to support this child?
• How do we strengthen the system around this child?
• How do we increase stability, support, and connection?
• Can we practice right now to shift patterns that maintain the behavior?

This is where meaningful, sustainable change occurs.

Final Thought

In ESFT, the identified client is never the whole story.

The client serves as the entry point into a system that is doing its best to adapt to a complex set of circumstances. When we take the time to understand the “who, what, and where” of that system, we move closer to interventions that are not only effective—but also compassionate, contextual, and lasting.

Because when we change the system, we change what is possible for every individual within it.

Put yourself in someone else’s shoes…

(PCFTTC does not have any religious affiliation with the recording entity, nor do they have any conflict of interest, or financial disclosures to make.)