About Boone County Mentoring Partnership’s mission, team, and leadership

The following transcription was generated with the help of AI. Accuracy is not guaranteed.

When we moved up to Boone County, I started working at a church south of town. Over the course of the next 13 years, I got to spend time with many youth who had some really hard stories, and they’re just trying to figure out how to navigate through life. And so my thought was, well, what would a good mentoring program look like in our community? I’m Matt Wilson, and I am the executive director of the Boone County Mentoring Partnership. We believe that the more adults that we have pouring into the kids, the better off the young people will be. And research shows that every child needs at minimum five good adult connections in their life. We have three primary programs. One is the mentoring program where we try to match kids in our community who could benefit from having another positive adult role model in their life with an adult in our community based on similar interests, personalities, strengths, needs, and their geographical proximity. We also have the graduation coach program, which has started its ninth year at Lebanon High School. And what we do there is we identify those kids who are at greatest risk of not completing high school and providing some intense accountability to make sure kids show up to school, make sure they are passing their classes, but it goes beyond just academics. Laurie Schrader, our graduation coach, along with a collection of other adults at the high school, spends a lot of time dealing with social and emotional and mental health related issues to help overcome any obstacles that they may have. That program’s had tremendous success. The third program that we have just recently brought under our organizational umbrella is the Youth Assistance Program. It serves as a central hub where families and young people can go and once the advocate assesses the needs, they’re able to help navigate the appropriate services or resources available to help prevent kids from going down the wrong path. We are not going to run out of young people that need mentors in our community, so we’re always recruiting mentors, but we understand also that for some people that they’re not able to help out in that way. Kind of goes back to that old saying, what can you offer your time, talent, or treasure? And in some cases some people may be able to offer their time. Some people can offer their talent and then other people, they have the resources and they’re just compelled to give because they want to help out kids. When someone donates to our organization, they are coming alongside our mentors, our graduation coach, and our advocate with YAP to come along and support these children. They may not be there physically, but they’re coming alongside the support and be a part of that success. To provide the appropriate support for our matches. It costs on average about $900 a year to support one match. Looking at national numbers we fall below the national average of about $13 to $1500 per match. So it may seem like a lot for one child but in the grand scheme of things it really is a low, low cost to help possibly change the course of one child’s life. I feel so fortunate to be in this role because we are able to see the impact and changes in kids’ lives just because people are willing to invest in them. (upbeat music) [Music]