Be A Mentor, Inc.

PURPOSE: To ensure children and youth transition to successful, productive, and happy adult citizens who contribute to the well-being of their communities and to society.

OUR AIM: To employ our experience, technology and success in partnering with organizations serving children to exponentially increase the number of children who have positive adult role models.

Over the next four years, Be A Mentor will pursue the following strategies to achieve its mission, vision and purpose:

• Organization - To grow and improve its internal capacity to become a leading organization in the mentoring field.

• Sustainability - To create a sustainable future by employing innovative and diversified fund development strategies.

• Mentoring Collaborations - To build the mentoring field by the use of a scalable process for developing and supporting collaborations of youth-serving providers.

• Corporation Support - To engage Corporations to invest and serve as role models to foster their future workforce and better the communities they do business.

• School District Support - To provide and support school districts, nationwide, with an efficient and effective system that assures student safety, for connecting volunteers and district partners with students to enhance academic achievement.

Be A Mentor is a nationally recognized leader in designing effective programs for recruiting, screening, training and matching high quality adult mentors with at-risk youth, and has demonstrated its effectiveness in improving academic and life outcomes for under-served children. We have developed and implemented a cloud-based software application for managing school district volunteers and long-term mentoring relationships that has the potential to be replicated and scaled anywhere. We have recently hired a Program Outreach Director to achieve our goals and strategies.
Some of our partners include:
• California Mentoring Partnership, with sixteen California area mentoring coalitions and nearly two hundred non-profit service providers
• California Department of Social Services and county departments of children and families throughout the state
• California Department of Education Coordinated School Health and Safety Office and county office of education foster youth service programs throughout the state
• California CASA (Court Appointed Special Advocates) Association and county CASAs
• California Youth Connection (CYC) and CYC chapters throughout the state
• Stars Behavioral Health Group with locations throughout California
• U S Department of Justice, Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention

School districts currently using Be a Mentor's management software system have more than doubled the number volunteers working in their schools, have set district-wide vetting requirements to which individual schools adhere, and provide online management tools for both district and school personnel to use. Now that the infrastructure for volunteerism is in place, districts can measure the effectiveness of volunteer programs using a variety of student performance indicators.

Be A Mentor has begun creating mentoring collaborations to increase the number of youth-mentor matches. We have initiated a state-wide initiative in California to reach thousands of high-needs youth in foster care.