Training Faculty
FIRSTLINK's presenters offer a varied background and deep roots in community service. Program trainers include:
President and CEO
Vice President of Training and Volunteer Services
Chief Operating Officer
Vice President of Resource Management
Mentoring Center of Central Ohio
Stephanie Sparrow Hughes
Stephanie Sparrow Hughes oversees day-to-day operations of the Mentoring Center including conducting background checks, recruiting volunteers, training mentors and making connections to partner agencies to improve programming. She manages a second office at the Ohio State University, working with OSU faculty and staff in recruiting students and developing mentoring programs. Through the OSU Buckeye Mentoring Hub, more than 400 OSU students serve as mentor/tutors to youth primarily near OSU.
Ms. Hughes holds an associate degree in social services from Columbus State Community College and a bachelors degree from Franklin University in business administration. She has been involved with mentoring programs including tutoring with the Columbus Literacy Council and with the city of Columbus Capital Kids program.
Mentoring Center of Central Ohio
Tessie N.M. Belue, J.D.,
Tessie N.M. Belue is an educational specialist for the Mentoring Center of Central Ohio where she creates training curricula and conducts training for mentors and mentees in both the profit and nonprofit sector.
Ms. Belue is also a mediator/facilitator/trainer consultant. As a consultant, she specializes in cultural competence, including religious, age, learning styles, gender and ethnic diversity and workplace conflict. She previously served as a legal services and municipal attorney in which her specialties were employment, civil rights, landlord/tenant, consumer, family and labor/personnel law.
Ms. Belue obtained her undergraduate degree in Spanish, French and German from New Mexico Highlands University. She also holds a J.D. from the University of California, Davis School of Law and a masters of divinity in pastoral theology from the American Baptist Seminary of the West, Berkeley, CA. She is the holder of several certificates in mediation: Basic, Cultural Competence, Transformative, Juvenile, Domestic Violence Issues, Child Custody and Divorce.
FIRSTLINK/Franklin County Kinship Navigator Program
Roderick Aldridge
Roderick Aldridge serves as the special projects coordinator for the Franklin County Kinship Navigator Program at FIRSTLINK, which provides resources, support and education for grandparents and other caregivers caring for a child who is not their own.
Roderick Aldridge previously served as an information and referral, and community resource specialist. Mr. Aldridge has coordinated several specialized grant funded projects, including one in which where he was responsible for overseeing child abuse prevention projects for 19 counties in Central and Southeast Ohio.
Mr. Aldridge is a graduate of Otterbein College with a degree in speech communication.
Benesch, Friedlander, Coplan & Aronoff LLP
Martha J. Sweterlitsch, Esq.
Martha J. Sweterlitsch is an attorney with the law firm of Benesch, Friedlander, Coplan & Aronoff in the firm's health care practice group. Her practice focuses on nonprofit, administrative, health, state tax, and federal and state tax exemption law and lobbying. Significant areas of practice include creation, reorganization, mergers and consolidations and ongoing counsel to nonprofit corporations, state and federal tax and tax exemption for nonprofit organizations, and legal issues related to charitable solicitation and fundraising.
Sweterlitsch is a board member of the American Association of Homes and Housing for the Aging, National Legal Committee, the Ohio Association of Nonprofit Organizations for which she chairs the Public Policy Working Group and is the attorney general's appointee to the Government Contracting Advisory Council.
Sweterlitsch obtained her bachelor of arts degree from The Ohio State University and her juris doctorate from The Ohio State University, Moritz College of Law.
Religion Newswriters
Ruth Sternberg
Ruth Sternberg is development director of Religion Newswriters, a national journalism organization whose mission is to advance the professional standards of religion reporting in the secular press as well as to create a support network for religion reporters. RNA strives to help improve and encourage religion writing excellence in the secular press.
She sits on the community advisory board of the Mentoring Center of Central Ohio and is an organizer of the Good Neighbors picnic for the homeless. She is a two-time recipient of the national Make a Difference Day programming award.
Ms. Sternbarg is a graduate of The Ohio State University, where she earned a journalism degree in the 1980s and holds an MA in history from Kent State University.
