National Mentoring Month is a time to raise awareness about the power and impact of mentoring, and recognize and celebrate the contributions of mentors. This month, we want to take a moment to celebrate all of our mentoring programs, as well as our staff and volunteer mentors. Each of our age groups has a mentoring program, and each one is incredibly valuable to our girls.
School-age:
Our youngest girls meet once a week in small groups, and come together with their staff mentor to do fun activities, get homework help, or just talk and get support.
Middle school:
Bold Futures is our middle school mentoring program, where small groups come together once a week and do activities that surround a theme to help them grow and learn as adolescents. The main goals of Bold Futures are to improve girls’ attitudes towards school and learning, through homework help as well as educational activities. Another goal is increasing the girls’ social competency and learning the benefits of teamwork. The girls are split into small groups and paired with a mentor who is a volunteer from the local community, and they work together to build skills and support each other throughout the year, also increasing the girls’ feelings of support.
High school:
For high schoolers, we have mentoring for both juniors and seniors to prepare and assist them through the college process. For the juniors, we use a team mentoring model, where we have a team of girls and a team of women to support and mentor them through the preparation for their senior year of high school and beyond. They work with a different mentor each week who specializes in a specific area, including essay writing or college and career path options. For the seniors, each girl is paired with her own mentor who they meet with each week and go through the college application process together. Mentors will help our girls decide on colleges and scholarships to apply for, assist with essay writing, and work to narrow down decisions on courses of study, among other things. This allows each of our girls to have a more personal intention throughout the college process and makes them feel truly supported. It also helps them to build relationships and a professional network, as mentors can often make connections with certain colleges or career paths.
We want to say a special thank you to all of our supporters, we could not do our work without each of you! We especially want to thank Heidi Nicholson and Lisa Almeida, the owners of Bella Sera Bridal in Danvers, who have been longtime supporters of Girls Inc of Boston and Lynn, and we are so grateful.
“We started this business from scratch in 2005 because there were so few places a bride of any size could go to shop for her wedding gown. We are truly an inclusive store that believes strongly in the experience of shopping for one of the biggest days of a bride’s life. We are best friends and business partners, and our business and friendship has endured ups and downs, but through it all we have grown both professionally and personally. Our friendship is stronger than ever.
We started attending the Girls Inc. luncheons about 6 years ago. The first event we attended touched us both on so many levels. I remember trying to hold back the tears! Seeing the amazing good this organization does for so many young women is something that is difficult to describe. It is so inspiring to hear the stories of the young ladies in the program who have endured so much yet have worked so hard to be the best they can possibly be. We are two strong women and we believe in making sure the next generation has all the opportunity that we both have had. To be able to give back to something we feel so strongly about warms our hearts. “