Cherie Bennett

Being a single mother with a young boy and girl; needless to say I was faced with a lot of challenges. I grew up one of five girls and family get-togethers had a strong female vibe to them. Subsequently, as my son was growing up, I was concerned that he needed a strong male influence in his life so I tried enrolling him in boy scouts, and karate which were good, but the groups weren’t much for individual attention.

One day, I saw an ad about the Big Brother program.

Big Brothers, Big Sisters is the largest youth mentoring organization in the US today, but too few people have heard of it. There are about 400 offices across all 50 states, Puerto Rico and Guam, and in 2007 more than 255,000 children – more than two times the number of just five years ago -- were fortunate enough to get brother / sister mentor.

I found the office in my city and in a week I got a “Big Brother” for my son! YOU can too:
http://www.bbbs.org/site/c.diJKKYPLJvH/b.1539751/k.BDB6/Home.htm

Big Brothers and Big Sisters are volunteers from the community and go through an intense screening process by the organization. My son’s “big brother” was a young man in college who had similar hobbies to my son. We all met each other and they started getting together weekly to do “guy stuff”. Today, my son is a 29 year old successful businessman and he and his “big brother” still keep in touch although the program stops at 18. His “big brother” was a positive role model at critical times in his life and also someone that he could talk to that wasn’t female.

Most of the advertising for Big Brothers Big Sisters is done by word of mouth. With the amount of good that this program does for children, there should be more advertising in different mediums such as television, radio, and on the internet. Not all kids that sign up get matched with a big brother or big sister because the number of kids outnumbers the volunteers.

With the amount of single parents at such a high level in 2010, do you agree that there should be more awareness of this highly successful one-on-one mentoring program so that more kids can be matched?

Graphic Credit:
Sabrina Segal