Jeremy Del Rio, Co Founder of Thrive Collective

Having the opportunity to intern at Thrive Collective I found a mentor in Jeremy Del Rio. At first I found this post very difficult to write because they was no one in the office I saw as mentorship material. I pictured my mentor as a young, black professional female working in the design field. Instead I found a middle aged white man with a background in law, religion and charity. I know this is supposed to be a design blog but I did not come across designers like myself. Even going to network events before this internship I came across people who I thought would be good mentors but showed no interest in mentoring or even sharing advice.

What caught my interest in Jermey as a mentor was an interview I overheard him having with someone in the office. He spoke about himself in depth and what lead him to open Thrive Collective. He is a man with a good heart that had to teach himself what was needed to start and run an organization such as Thrive Collective when he saw that his community was in need of something for the kids to do after school and making the community look good again through murals.

Working with Jeremy taught me that we can not be selfish. I would like to start my own charity organization in the future and I have Jeremy to thank for the inspiration. My charity will be mentorship based for young black women within the urban community. Sorry my blog was not more of how I got design mentorship but I am going to walk away from my internship with an idea of the type of person I want to be and the impact I would like to make in my community and that is thanks to Jeremy.