TIFFANY NG - [X]PRESS 2.0 Will E. Chapman, 22, and son Reign Chapman, 1, listen as Baayan Bakari, right, teaches at the Mentor Center.

It's the kind of discussion that would feel at home in a college classroom. Only this classroom is full of ex-convicts.

Started in 1995, the Positive Minds Group at Oakland's Mentoring Center has helped many at-risk youth reevaluate their lives through what the center calls "transformative mentoring." The free workshop helps its students become role models for others through "character development, cognitive restructuring, spiritual development, life skills training, anger management and employability skills" according to the PMG Web site.

"It is important for everybody to have role models because everybody has to look up to someone," said PMG group member and UC Berkeley student Kellan Patterson.

Without strong role models, young men are at a higher risk for developing negative behavior, according to the 2005 study, "National Mentoring Relationship and Adolescent Health," in the American Journal of Public Health.

At a recent PMG meeting, about 20 young people sit around in tables with their attention fixed on the speaker, Baayan Bakari. Barkari, director of programs and training, uses a combination of technology, speeches and posters to motivate the students and to keep the group positive.

"At least 80 percent of the people in that room have been coming for years," Bakari said.

Baayan Bakari started working as a youth educator at age 17, and has been running the PMG at the mentoring center for 10 years.

"This work I do is a calling," he said. "I didn't find it, it found me."

Each year, the Mentoring Center hosts between 90 and 130 "adjudicated and incarcerated youth" ages 14 to 25, according to the center's website. In addition to its two direct mentoring programs, the center also helps to train other counselors and conducts mentoring sessions at other locations.

"This program allows me to continue to grow as an instructor and a teacher with the knowledge that I teach these young men and young women," Bakari said of his own growth as a mentor.

Researchers found " a broad and multifaceted impact of mentoring relationships on adolescent health." Mentors can improve the health, education, self-esteem and safety of youth especially when they are family members, according to the study by David L. Dubois and Naida Silverthorn.

The same study also found that mentoring at-risk youth poses unique challenges and that "mentoring relationships alone are not enough to meet the needs of at risk youths and therefore should be incorporated into more comprehensive interventions."

"For many adolescent males, the passage from boyhood to manhood is challenging," said Gregory Doss, director of teams at the Boys and Girls Club in Atlanta, Ga, "It is a journey that requires young men to understand and manage new and confusing issues, while experiencing greater freedom, increased responsibility, peer pressure and physical changes."