THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, April 21, 1996 TAG: 9604190012
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J4 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Editorial
LENGTH: Medium: 66 lines
Big Brothers Big Sisters of South Hampton Roads marks its 25th anniversary with an April 24 fund-raising banquet at the Marriott Waterside. The theme of the event is ``heroes,'' and the featured speaker of the evening is heroic Apollo 13 astronaut and retired U.S. Navy Rear Adm. Ken ``T.K.'' Mattingly.
The heroes being spotlighted are the thousands of carefully chosen men and women who have served as positive adult role models and mentors to 12,000 young people in South Hampton Roads over a quarter-century.
The Big Brothers Big Sisters movement has been nurturing youngsters at risk of going bad for more than nine decades. It is the granddaddy/grandmomma of countless ``mentoring'' programs that have emerged, especially since the 1960s, in response to the desperate need of so many children for regular contact with caring, stable adults.
Mentoring is an act of faith. There's no way to guarantee that time, knowledge and guidance bestowed by a mentor on a youngster from a disarrayed household and engaged in anti-social activities will become an achieving student and an empathetic human being with a fair shot at successful living.
But life teaches that how adults touch the lives of children can determine whether the youngsters thrive or wither and rot. And a study by Philadelphia-based not-for-profit Public/Private Ventures, which is dedicated to helping to improve the lives and the prospects of the young, found gratifying evidence that mentoring - by Big Brothers Big Sisters specifically - has salutary effects upon the young.
With funding from philanthropic organizations, Public/Private Ventures researchers compared the behavior of hundreds of 10- to l6-year-olds who had been matched up with Big Brothers and Big Sisters for 18 months with the behavior of a similar number of children who had been waiting during the same time period to be matched. The researchers concluded that youngsters enrolled in the program were less likely than those on the waiting list to start using alcohol or drugs or strike someone and more likely to attend school regularly, perform better academically and experience improvement in relationships with their families and peers.
Big Brothers Big Sisters achieves such heartening gains at comparatively little expense. Matching a Big Brother with a Little Brother or Big Sister with a Little Sister costs but hundreds of dollars in South Hampton Roads. Each volunteer is extensively interviewed and his/her background checked thoroughly. The volunteer commits to being a mentor for at least a year. Most matches last three to five years. Many develop into lifetime relationships. The young participants are also screened, as are their parents.
Ninety percent of Little Brothers and Little Sisters are from single-parent households. Two-hundred youngsters are currently being mentored (75 at school) in South Hampton Roads - a fraction of the 75,000 a year mentored by Big Brothers and Big Sisters nationwide.
Demand for mentors far exceeds supply. But finding suitable mentors is less a problem than raising money. With greater funding, the South Hampton Roads Big Brothers Big Sisters would match many more adult mentors with at-risk children, thus saving many hundreds of youngsters from alcohol and drug dependency, prison and lives on welfare. That Big Brothers Big Sisters lives on lean rations is, alas, scant cause for celebration. MEMO: Big Brothers Big Sisters of South Hampton Roads' telephone number is
490-KIDS.
by CNB