Big Brothers Big Sisters of Central Indiana, Inc.

Big Brothers Big Sisters works to ensure we are addressing the needs of the community by providing a caring adult in the life of a child. These caring relationships can have a positive impact on otherwise potential risk factors. Some of those indicators include but are not limited to:
Working with families below the poverty line
Identifying the family status
Supporting youth involved in the juvenile justice system
Referring families to other community agencies to ensure basic needs are met
Supporting immigrant families
Working with youth with disabilities
Supporting LGBTQ youth and adults
Engaging local law enforcement and first responders as mentors
Encouraging youth to graduate from high school
Providing scholarship for youth to attend college or trade school

In our 2017-2022 strategic plan, our primary goal is to serve 1,500 youth annually by 2022. To accomplish this, we are focused on volunteer engagement, visibility and marketing, sustainable funding, and staff attraction and retention.

Beyond formal initiatives, BBBSCI works collaboratively in many ways to accomplish our mission. Examples of our collaborative work are as follows:
1) To serve new or specific populations - To engage new volunteers and/or reach new/specific populations of youth, BBBSCI will develop collaborations with specific purposes or objectives.
2) To engage volunteers - BBBSCI partners with companies, faith organizations, colleges, and other community organizations to recruit volunteer mentors. For many of these, efforts are focused around neighborhood priorities of partner organizations.
3) To provide opportunities to matches - BBBSCI partners with more than 125 other organizations and businesses to provide free/discounted activities and opportunities to matches. Other partners host events for matches or offer free tickets to local events.
4) To maximize impact for youth - BBBSCI partners strategically with initiatives or other efforts to benefit youth we serve and support broader community initiatives.
5) To connect youth and families to additional services - BBBSCI partners with other services and organizations to connect youth and families to other resources they may need while waiting for BBBSCI service or while enrolled in our program. This often includes mental health or basic needs referrals, but also aims to inform families of other beneficial programming in the community.
6) To build a bridge between mentors and schools - BBBSCI has formal partnerships with 50+ elementary, middle, and high schools throughout Marion, Hamilton, and Johnson counties. These school partnerships were established to generate youth referrals to the BBBSCI program, allow mentors to visit youth at school, and connect mentors to the academic lives of their mentees.
7) To generate funding and awareness - BBBSCI builds mutually beneficial relationships with many funders, sponsors, and partners in the community to raise the funds and awareness necessary to support our mission. Whenever possible, BBBSCI aims to build layered relationships with financial supporters that could open doors for volunteers or other opportunities for our program.

BBBSCI's one-to-one mentoring program (our only program) is proven to improve academic engagement and success, avoidance of risky behaviors, and socio-emotional competency. We use the formula Length + Strength = Outcomes as a basis for measuring successful program results. We know the longer a match lasts (measure match retention rate) and the stronger the relationship (measure strength of relationship) the greater number and greater significant of outcomes that will be achieved by the youth (measure with outcome survey).

BBBSCI utilizes a number of evaluation tools and methods to thoroughly assess strengths and weaknesses, make adjustments and plan for the future, to inform funding requests and our Board, and to report on our progress to stakeholders and the community. BBBSCI tracks many program metrics monthly to oversee and improve operations as well as results. Through ongoing evaluation, we monitor the outcomes of our youth (Youth Outcome Survey), the strength of mentoring relationships (Strength of Relationship Surveys and monthly contacts), the satisfaction of our Bigs and Parents (satisfaction surveys), and the satisfaction with agency sponsored activities (activity surveys). This information is then used to make adjustments and provide individualized coaching to the volunteers and youth served by our program. It is also used to make system-wide changes to continually refine and strengthen program results. Additionally, being a learning organization, we have conducted two Six Sigma program improvement projects which guide the implementation and measurement of many program improvements.

We also collect feedback from electronic surveys twice a year specifically on satisfaction and outcomes from parents and mentors in addition to collecting feedback immediately following the enrollment process. We collect ongoing feedback during monthly contacts (phone calls/in-person meetings) with staff and use the BBBSA Strength of Relationship survey tool to ensure child safety and relationship progression. In both of our Six Sigma projects, the "voice of the customer" was obtained to collect a significant amount of feedback from our stakeholders (mostly volunteers and parents) prior to making program improvement decisions

After spending over five years focusing on improvements in program quality and impact, we were confident that we were providing the best quality of service in our agency’s history. Meanwhile, we were serving 1,100 youth annually and our demand for service grew significantly from 300 youth to more than 1,000 youth on the waiting list. This combination of increased demand for service and confidence in programmatic quality and impact positioned us to begin the deliberate process to grow our scale of service. Our Board and staff established a 2017-2022 strategic plan focused on growth in service to 1,500 youth annually. In the first and second years of this plan, we served more than 1,200 relationships and more than 1,300 relationships, respectively. During this third year of the strategic plan, we plan to serve more than 1,400 mentoring relationships.