Be the change you wish you to see in the world. – Mahatma Ghandi
October 13, 2009
This Week in Mentoring News
Each week we will bring you a few news stories about mentoring from around the country. Below are a few exceptional pieces from the past week:
Boys can look up to Teen Heroes
Editorial: Study on dropouts supports intervention
Mentors help address dropout problem
New York Business Women Mentor Teen Girls in Entrepreneurship at Girls Going Places Conference
October 8, 2009
Achiever Art Work
Each week we’ll delight you with a new piece of art from one of our Achievers. Enjoy!
October 7, 2009
The Community Service Movement at Friends-Boston
Every week a different Friends-Boston staff member offers their own insight, wisdom, and personal reflection through a guest blog post. This week’s Friends-Boston staff blog post is written by Ms. Rebekka.
On April 21, 2009, President Barack Obama signed the Edward M. Kennedy Serve America Act. The Serve America 
Act reauthorized and expanded national service programs administered by the Corporation for National and Community Service by amending the National and Community Service Act of 1990 and the Domestic Volunteer Service Act of 1973. It will encourage an increase in number of AmeriCorps members to 250,000 by 2017. It is clear to me that the community service movement is the movement of our time and community service is woven deep within the fabric of Friends-Boston.
Last year 10 AmeriCorps Members and 3 AmeriCorps VISTA Members served at Friends-Boston. This year 60 AmeriCorps Members and 7 AmeriCorps VISTAS will serve at Friends-Boston. You may start to see the bright blue Friends-Boston logo on t-shirts of Mentors as they ride trains, buses, libraries and community centers. Friends-Boston Mentors and Achievers will be reading books together, doing homework and discovering the amazing resources of our city.
Our volunteer Board of Directors helps raise funds and support Friends-Boston mentoring programs in a myriad of ways. Volunteers from Fidelity Investments are volunteering through our Reading Buddies Program. Once per week employees spend one hour of their time reading with an Achiever at the Fidelity offices. Last year volunteers from Wellington Management worked with Achievers to develop their math skills and they painted walls, organized games and catalogued our library.
Volunteers with our Family Friends Program are matched with an Achiever for two years. They go on outings with Achievers and their mentors to museums and complete community service activities. This year we will also host five community service events. Achievers will lead and participate in Community Service activities in our community. They might read with younger children, make blankets for sick children or feed the homeless.
Our contributors donate their services and provide the grants and donations that enable us to provide our unique long-term mentoring program. They are volunteers as well. Volunteers serve on our committees for our annual event, work to help the event run and help us clean up when everything is over. Volunteers donate gift certificates and items for our auction and our auctioneer is even a volunteer! Our IT professional volunteers much of his time as does our web designer, our printer volunteers as a designer.
This community service movement has the capacity to create real and lasting change. People who become volunteers are changed. Their ideas are shifted, their priorities are re-organized; their view is altered. Friends-Boston is a small and growing example of the way that this movement can cause change because beginning with individuals who decide they are willing to serve.
October 5, 2009
Quote of the Week
Do not wait for leaders; do it alone, person to person.
~ Mother Teresa
October 1, 2009
Achiever Art Work
Each week we’ll delight you with a new piece of art from one of our Achievers. Enjoy!
September 30, 2009
175 Miles and a Whole Lot of Fun
Every week a different Friends-Boston staff member offers their own insight, wisdom, and personal reflection through a guest blog post. This week’s Friends-Boston staff blog post is written by Ms. Holly.
On Saturday, September 26 I joined hundreds of “friends of children” at the Rodman Ride for Kids in Foxboro, MA. Our four Friends-Boston riders joined the Mass Mentoring Partnership team to complete a bike ride to benefit statistically at-risk children throughout the state. Our team raised a total of $980 and had a wonderful time biking, barbecuing and celebrating with staff members and supporters from numerous non-profits and youth service agencies.
While my friends and co-workers participated in the ride, I served as a volunteer cheerleader and traffic director close to the finish line. I was touched to see that even after biking over twenty miles, almost all of the riders looked energetic and cheerful. Many of them shouted greetings, rang bells or honked horns as they passed me. Every participant was motivated and inspired by the common factor that brought us together that day: a commitment to serving the children in Massachusetts who are most in need of our support.
Congratulations to current Friends-Boston AmeriCorps VISTAs Zeeba, Rachel and Laura and former Friends-Boston Mentor Lucas for completing the Rodman Ride for Kids!
If you would still like to donate to the Friends-Boston bike team, please visit our team page.
Putting the bikes on the bike rack was more challenging than the ride itself (and almost as time-consuming).
Our three 25-mile bikers! (Our fourth team member, Lucas, completed the 100-mile ride and had already set off by the time we arrived)
Friends-Boston AmeriCorps VISTAs Rachel, Laura and Zeeba.
The starting line!
Congratulations to our riders!Hundreds of bikers prepare to set off on the 25-mile ride.
September 29, 2009
This Week in Mentoring News
Each week we will bring you a few news stories about mentoring from around the country. Below are a few exceptional pieces from the past week:
Big Brothers Big Sisters wins grant to mentor ex-youth offenders
September 23, 2009
Reflections on the First Year of Service
Every week a different Friends-Boston staff member offers their own insight, wisdom, and personal reflection through a guest blog post. This week’s Friends-Boston staff blog post is written by Ms. Marie-Laure.
It has officially been over a year since I have worked at Friends of the Children. About a year ago today, I was sitting in an overly air-conditioned room of a community center getting ready for training. I would have been getting my notebook ready to learn about CPS conversations or avoiding burn out, or learning to work with children with behavioral issues.
I remember watching people slowly trickle into that room, clutching to their portable coffee cups, waiting for the caffeine to take effect. I was really anxious to know who these people were. To know what they liked and disliked, to know about their own experiences and passions. I was excited to see how they would interact with their achievers. I was anxious to get to know my own Achievers and to see what I would learn from it. I was so eager to go out there and get started in my year of service; I could hardly sit still in my seat for the whole training period.
While that training period proved essential to my work with the Achievers, I remember thinking it would never end. I looked at the Friends with envy and awe at all of the things they had done with their Achievers. They could easily tell you a story that would knock your socks off no matter what. I kept wondering if I would have similar accounts to tell about my own Achievers. And when I’d finally meet them, would they like me? Would they think as was as cool as the friends’ Achievers thought them?
As the months past, I became much more comfortable with the Positive Peer Mentors –we even developed quite a tight support system- and with the Achievers I had come to meet. A far cry from the cool community center, I was now going into the schools, into museums, libraries and parks, meeting families and educators; all of this in a day’s work. It was exhausting at times, it was frustrating at times, it was exhilarating and joyous, it was not like anything I had ever experienced in my whole life. Even four years of college were not as intense as a year of direct service as a Positive Peer Mentor.
Now, a year later, I have been extensively thinking about that experience. I am now very close with the former Positive Peer Mentors that I was so anxious about knowing – I live two blocks away from them and see them all the time. I have become extremely close to families, attending their barbecues, parties and end of school celebrations. My walls at home are full of achiever art and photos, and every time I look at them, I am reminded of why I do this work. Even though I work at Friends of the Children-Boston in a different capacity, as a Mentoring Program Coordinators who supports the new Positive Peer Mentors and the Master Mentors, my work as a Positive Peer Mentor still remains with me to this day. It informs my work, it informs my decisions for graduate school programs and in life.
September 22, 2009
This Week in Mentoring News
Each week we will bring you a few news stories about mentoring from around the country. Below are a few exceptional pieces from the past week:
Mentors are needed so fewer kids will fail
