Statistics and Anecdotes

Does Mentoring work? Listen to what our kids are saying:

"I look forward to mentoring with Lori every week. We talk and play. She helps me feel happy when I'm sad. We work on my English and I teach her Spanish. We have a fun group we meet with. We play group games. We all get along well. If we have a problem, they help us. So - mentoring means a lot to me."

"It's like a wonderful rainbow that comes to me once a week - and brings joy and happiness."

"People that care about you, that's what mentoring means to me."

We literally have hundreds of similar testimonials in our files from children all across Long Island.

And - you can read the research that validates what the children are telling us:

New research results from Public/Private Ventures. Check it out at www.ppv.org. In a Louis Harris poll on mentoring: (of 400 juniors and seniors), 73% of students said their mentors helped them raise their goals and expectations, 87% of students went directly to college or planned to attend college within one year of graduating high school, 59% of mentored students improved their grades, 87% of mentored students said they benefited from their relationships.

The Public/Private Ventures study of the Big Brothers/Big Sisters one-to-one mentoring found that children in the program were 46% less likely than their peers to start using illegal drugs, 52% less likely than their peers to skip a day of class.

"The number one indicator of success for a child is a good relationship with a caring adult." -Fortune Magazine

In "Growing Up Poor", an ethnographic study of impoverished teenagers, Terry Williams and William Kornblum found that "the probabilities that a teenager will end up on the corner or in a stable job" are attributable to "the presence or absence of adult mentors".

Emmy Werner reached a similar conclusion in a thirty year study of disadvantaged children growing up on a sugar planatation in Hawaii: "Without exception, all the children who thrived had at least one person that provided them with consistent emotional support - a grandmother, an older sister, a teacher, a neighbor."

According to Jay Smink, Executive Director of the National Dropout Prevention center at Clemston University, "Researchers have found that school dropouts often cite as one of the primary reasons for leaving the absence of one person who cared about them."