For Mentors, the Future Is Academic

The resume of Dr. Gary Gitnick, 58, professor at the UCLA School of Medicine, runs about seven pages.

Conversely, the resume of Marcello Bermudez, at age 12, may have noted a skill in lock-picking and auto theft. “I was the only kid in the eighth grade who would drive to school,” said Bermudez, now 23 and a college graduate and owner of a personal safety equipment company.

The lives of Gitnick, an Encino resident, and Bermudez, of Sun Valley, share a common thread, however. For both, it was one simple event--a luncheon--that changed their lives.

For Bermudez, the change was choreographed in part by the Fulfillment Fund, a group started by Gitnick 20 years ago that matches struggling students with successful mentors who will stop at almost nothing to make sure the education is completed.

As an eighth-grader years ago in Omaha, Gitnick happened to be selected to join a Rotary Club function. Living in a tough neighborhood where childhood friends were crippled and imprisoned because of a life of violence, Gitnick had no idea of a better kind of life until then. “I never would have been allowed into that club,” said Gitnick, chief of the division of digestive diseases at UCLA.

The luncheon would not only spur Gitnick to success, but inspire a desire to help children later in life.

At UCLA, Gitnick started organizing Christmas parties for disabled children in the early 1970s. He founded the Fulfillment Fund initially to help disabled children, but would later expand it to help a wide variety of disadvantaged youth.

Using a network of counselors and teachers throughout Los Angeles, students are brought into the program who have learning potential but who are at risk of joining gangs, using drugs or dropping out of school.

Currently, about 1,200 students are matched with mentors in the Fulfillment Fund, and Gitnick estimates about 10,000 lives have been touched.

Ten years ago, Bermudez warily agreed to attend a luncheon sponsored by the Fulfillment Fund. “I was really leery of them,” he recalled.

But when he met Harlan Spinner, now a senior vice president at Smith Barney, the two hit it off because Bermudez had also had a strong interest in the stock market. The Wall Street Journal had been a favorite of Bermudez’s for a long time. “I was impressed with Marcello,” Spinner said. “What impressed me the most was that he took advantage of the offers I made to help him.”

With Spinner’s encouragement, Bermudez graduated near the top of his class at Francis Polytechnic High School in Sun Valley and earned a degree in finance from USC.

“Harlan was on my tail,” Bermudez said. “There wasn’t a semester that went by that he wasn’t checking in on me, not only to ask what I was learning, but to make sure I was taking the right classes.”

As the Fulfillment Fund has grown--now using a staff of trained educators and a $2.5-million annual budget--it has evolved into a sophisticated operation with regular training for mentors and a variety of programs for students.

For all the help, the Fulfillment Fund asks the students only one thing: to become mentors themselves.

“We don’t give them charity,” Gitnick said. “We tell them whatever we give them they owe us threefold. When they leave college, they will mentor three other youngsters.”

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