Big Brothers Big Sisters of the Desert

Directly impacting a child’s life is a long-term endeavor. To break the cycle of children living in adverse situations, we believe mentoring is a proven and powerful tool to help youth reach their full potential. We define mentoring as the presence of a caring person offering support, advice, friendship, reinforcement and constructive examples. Quality mentoring relationships offer significant potential to reduce the adverse effects of absentee fathers/mothers by improving young people’s attitudes toward parents, encouraging youth to focus on their education, and helping kids face daily challenges. Our mentoring is accomplished by using three core programs: Community-based mentoring, Site-Based mentoring and our Empowering Potential Program - which addresses the problem of inequity in preparation and support for college and career success. Our aim is to have every child in our program prepared to be put on the path for college, career and life success.

Our strategies are two-fold:
1) Recruitment of Children for Program Services
2) Recruitment of Volunteers to be the Service Providers

This is achieved by strategically partnering with schools, after-school youth programs, mental health providers, businesses and faith-based organizations to help identify children who can benefit from a mentor. Continual outreach to volunteer rich organizations, businesses, service clubs and social clubs to identify mentors. Increased public relations efforts though public speaking engagements, social media posts, radio and television interviews , public service announcements and impact stories featured in the local print materials (newspaper and magazines).

The volunteer Bigs are carefully screened and trained in order to ensure child safety and relationship quality. The youth and their families are also assessed to determine the needs of the child and preferences of the parent, so that we are able to make a match. Each match will be paired based on common interests and backgrounds, complementary personalities, and the potential to form a long bond from the very start of their relationship. Highly-trained and committed Match Support Specialists will work with each child, volunteer and parent, regularly checking in to ensure the relationship is happy and strong.

Supporting all aspects of growth and youth development allows for a well-rounded mentoring experience, providing youth with the proper resources to succeed in life.

We have 4 full-time program staff members who have all gone through the required BBBSA training and Child Safety Certification programs and average 6 years working for BBBSD. All Program Staff have earned college degrees and are bilingual to better serve our community since over 60% of the children served are Hispanic. We have one part-time staff member also with a college degree, who oversees the Empowering Potential Program, who works with our Littles who are in high school to achieve long-term educational and career success. Overseeing the entire staff is our founding Executive Director who has been with BBBSD for 22 years.

Our program staff work as a team to achieve the greatest results and fulfillment of our mission yet they each play a specific role in that team. They are all cross-trained in each role within the organization as well. Continual education and training is provided to program staff to keep up with the latest youth development trends.

Since the development of our Empowering Potential Program over 10 years ago, 100% of our matched Littles graduated from high school with over 90% going onto higher education (university or community college), vocational training programs or military service.
Our average match length has increased by 7% which indicates longer and stronger match relationships.

We are developing more career mentoring aspects to our Empowering Potential Program through our speaker series with guest speakers, trainers scheduled to cover financial responsibilities of a young adult "Credit Do's and Don'ts", Panel of business professionals who talk about their path to their career and College Admissions Personnel and a panel of retired military serviceman to talk about their experience and their path in the military branch they were in.