So…why not mentoring?
While many of Colorado’s youth continue to fall through the cracks, we have found an amazing, breakthrough system that invests in youth people, teaches them skills, gives them hope, and helps them to invest in a brighter future for themselves. Are you ready for it? It is called mentoring and it is just a phone call away (hint – 303-756-9285).
All that may sound well and good, but we can back it up, too. Remember that recitivism rate? 80%. Under our Success Journey program, youth who spend the full year in the program with a mentor have a 96% success rate. That equates to a 4% recitivism rate.
But wait, there’s more. More than 85% of our youth who are matched with a mentor in our 1-to-1 program stay matched for a full year and most report better grades and higher self esteem. In our site-based groups, many of the kids week-to-week report that the best thing that happened to them was the group session and having the mentors visit them.
From doing mentoring for 15 years, we have found that when we take caring volunteers, place them with youth who have no positive adult role model, something unbelievable and unexpected happens – the kids like it!
What we do isn’t rocket science. We care for kids by spending time with them and loving them and encouraging them, and all of it combines to produce a very powerful message to our youth: You matter.
We have lofty dreams. We want every kid in Colorado to know what a healthy, positive adult looks like. But that gets a little hard unless we have a surplus of healthy, positive adults, right?
It turns out that the kids need someone to care about them. They need a mentor. They need you.