A
report* commissioned in 2013 by MENTOR, an organization dedicated to closing
the mentoring gap for our nation’s youth, revealed that there are an estimated
9 million at –risk youth who will reach the age of 19 without ever having had a
mentor. The report also reveals that
these youth are far less likely than their mentored counterparts to get the
support they need to succeed in school and aspire to higher education.
In
contrast, results from surveys of youth mentored in the Big Brothers Big
Sisters of South Texas program in 2013 show the following:
- 93% of students expect to graduate from high school, and
- 85% of students plan to attend college
These
results are what spur our organization to grow the BBBS program to the point at
which every child that needs or wants a Big Brother or Big Sister is able to
get one immediately. Core to our mission
is an ability to recruit volunteers to serve as mentor “Bigs.” We firmly believe that this community is
filled with potential mentors ripe for recruitment, and that we can attract,
screen, train, match and retain as many of these individuals as we need to work
with at risk youth. The problem, as we
see it, is not a lack of volunteers, it is a lack in the expertise of volunteer
recruitment. We have this
expertise. Over the past several decades
we have honed our recruitment techniques to the point that we bring in more
volunteers than we can effectively process.
The
issue is properly screening, training and supervising these volunteers in order
for them to serve as effective mentors. This requires a professional staff to
ensure that all volunteers are fully vetted and trained before they are matched
to a child. Further staff oversight is necessary once the volunteer has been matched
to a child to provide guidance and support through the life of the match to
both the volunteer and the child’s family. We need adequate funding to pay for
a professional staff large enough to supervise all the volunteers on our wait
list. We have the volunteers. What we need is the resources to match them to
the kids. We firmly believe that with the help of our donors we can transform our
community by ensuring that our youth are growing up with positive attention from
adults.
(“The Mentoring Effect: Young People’s
Perspectives on the Outcomes and Availability of Mentoring,” a report for
MENTOR, January 2014.)
Thanks to Todd Hedley for helping me wordsmith this article for our annual report.
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