Kate at Babylune ran this crafty little contest where she asked everyone to blog about thier favorite charity and then she was going to give her blogging income to the winning charity.

Very cleverly, she devised a way to include everyone and make everyone feel validated and appreciated by dividing the winnings up among all entrants.

Here is the entry in which she chose Big Brothers Big Sisters as the recipient in honor of myself and Jennifer of Tree Hugging Family. Both of us are fans of mentoring.

Jennifer has a great story titled One Small Step about how an odd coupling of mentors, from her mother’s meeting a man in a bar, changed her life.

Jennifer is now a mentor herself and I’m stealing a few of the great stats from Big Brothers Big Sisters that support mentoring from her blog.

Kids with mentors are:

• 46% less likely to begin using illegal drugs
• 27% less likely to begin using alcohol
• 52% less likely to skip school
• 37% less likely to skip a class
• more confident of their performance in schoolwork
• one-third less likely to hit someone
• getting along better with their families

Thanks for your great contest Kate and thanks for helping us get the word out about mentoring. You Rock. I hope you have the best Bulgarian Vegetarian Feast anyone ever had. I appreciate everything you do to help women through one of the most transformative experiences in life – having a baby.

Find a mentoring group in your zip code by clicking on Mentoring.org.

Post from: Blisstree

I Won the Babylune Contest!

But, it’s a big goal so I have to choose smaller, more tangible things with more instant gratification - little wins – to keep me motivated. Mentoring is one of those things. Something achievable.

By investing one hour a week in a my assigned kid I can influence her world. That makes me feel powerful and effective.

For example, last year my protege was in four resource classes. This year, she passed her standardized tests and is now in only one resource class. That’s big tangible progress. Last year she said she loved to sing, and sing she can, but she didn’t want to take choir. This year she signed up for choir, cooking and dance.

I took Ambrea, Ainsley and Zack out for expensive deserts at a fancy restaurant to celebrate the start of the new school year. We talked about high academic expectations and I offered bribes for grades. Why not?

That’s success. That’s gratifying to me. That’s something tangible that I can take hold of which makes me feel effective. I have discovered that I like to feel effective. Action makes me feel empowered.

If you’re looking for a way to positively impact the world I highly recommend mentoring. Visit mentoring.org for a mentoring program in your area.

Post from: Blisstree

Mentoring Success

It sounds shockingly low, especially since I am a work-from-home mom and I treasure 12 minutes away from kids in my face (I’m exaggerating, my children are wonderful people and I choose this life). But, if you’re a single-parent with a full-time job and the kids go to bed by 7:30 p.m. it’s not hard to imagine that kids might only score 12 minutes of face-to-face talking a day.

One of my pet-peeves is complaining with no action. Not that I never do it, but I don’t do it indefinitely. I constantly see people deciding to home school rather than be involved in the public schools, going to church but never leaving that safe haven, succeeding in careers and forgetting what it was like to struggle and all the while complaining about what the world is coming to.

 For myself, there is no question that everyone should be doing something to make the planet a better place to live for everyone. If the rich don’t take care of the poor, if the successful don’t show the unsuccessful their trade secrets, if the reformed doesn’t help the unreformed, if the educated doesn’t help the uneducated we’re all screwed.

Well, then the downtrodden in our world become too violent, angry, and resentful to be anything but dangerous.

I’m a mentor and I encourage anyone who has one hour of boredom or depression in their week to join me. Service is the cure for both. All these kids need is one hour a week of someone taking the time to encourage better grades and say words like ”college” and “career” and “choices” in phrases that apply to them to make a difference. 

Be the Change. Be a Mentor. Go to www.mentor.org and find a program in your town. It costs nothing. Mentors do not have to be perfect. Literally anyone can do it. Yes, You too.

Post from: Blisstree

Echo Oprah – Be A Mentor

This year, me and my mentee will be sitting at our group’s table alone. By some weird twist of fate and miscommunication we went shopping for her special outfit on Friday. I had thought all the mentors were taking their own girls individually and had arranged to do it on Friday night. But, none of the other mentors did. Due to our leader having a sick daughter going in for surgery, my mentee being out sick, and the other mentor’s job, one mentor ended up taking 3 teenagers to shop for their outfits after school yesterday.

The 3 girls were busted shoplifting.

By the grace of God, my girl and myself weren’t anywhere in the picture. Therefore we will be sitting at our table by ourselves.

The other girls are not being allowed to attend the banquet. Two of the girls’ parents were fine with letting them go tonight – can you believe it? Talk about a devastating lack of consequences. But, we are refusing to take them. There is no way we are rewarding them for shoplifting during a mentoring shopping excursion.

It’s shocking but not that surprising. These are at-risk teenagers. They aren’t the kids who are on the honor roll or have a ton of ambition or know the meaning of consequences.

I won’t share this with them, because I don’t want to encourage them.

But, once my poor mother was humiliated beyond reason when a police cruiser pulled up to the family reunion and hauled out my friend and I, both in handcuffs. We had been busted for shoplifting a lighter and had managed to ditch the stolen cigarettes during the bust.

I can’t seem to recall what my consequences were for that, but I know it was big. Like being grounded for the rest of the summer probably.

I sometimes have an overwhelming feeling that it was only through a miracle, the grace of God, that I didn’t end up dead or in prison, during my lengthy period of rebellion and risky behavior. I just pray these girls are blessed with the same grace, because if not, oh how I fear for them.

These girls need mentors, click here to find a program near you.

Post from: Blisstree

Consequences

Turns out he just wanted to watch some VH1. I turned on the Jump Start music videos – why don’t they play these more than just in the early morning? He shut right up. Snuggled up. And drifted off to sleep. I tried to go back to bed. Nope. Wasn’t gonna happen. Back to the living room and VH1 and right back to slumberland.

Heading off to an area swap meet. It’s called a Trade Day. Quite possibly I am even cheaper than Thrifty Mommy. Sometimes I think I am cheap to the point of mental illness. You know, like when I insist on shaving my legs with the cheapest possible razor only to suffer razor burn and cuts for 20 years rather than spend an extra $8. Really struggling to find a balance.

For instance, I staged a photograph of all the grandkids, including the newborn, on Easter for my mother-in-law’s Mother’s Day gift. I ordered a very nice 16X20 canvas print from a professional lab. Paid extra for a luster gloss and even some color correction because I don’t trust the color on my monitor. However, today I’m looking for the frame to put it in at the Trade Days. Why not recycle one that I can pick up for cheap? I’m hoping to spend no more than $5 for a $200ish frame. I’ve done it before.

Also on my list of things to find is a Zack-sized chair. He’s really into sitting in his own chair, but sadly he doesn’t have one yet. Hoping to blow less than $2 on this expenditure.

I took my mentee girl shopping last night for our big mentoring banquet that’s coming up. I was excited to go looking for formal dresses. Really I virtually never have any reason to get really dressed up. I’ve been using the same formal gown since after having my daughter, but the last time I wore it I was finally too small. Great excuse to buy a new one. Turns out kids today are not that interested in wearing any type of formal gown or fancy dress. She bought a pair of slacks and a blouse. Since we first went to Ross, the outfit cost only $20 total and we had $30 of our budget to score some pumps and a handbag. She was thrilled to get the new shoes and bag. Hello, Payless. You could pay more, but why?

Since she’s wearing pants, I’ll just wear the black pin-striped slacks my mother-in-law handed down. I may find a fancy blouse for cheap, cheap, cheap today at the swap meet.

Wish me luck.

Post from: Blisstree

VH1 Baby, Trade Days, Slacks from Ross

I worry about girls getting STDs from experimenting with love and sex. I worry about girls becoming prey to fast talking older men who are really just sexual predators. I worry about eating disorders, low self esteem and poor body image.

I sometimes get a sick hopeless feeling in my stomach when I read things like Dove’s Campaign for Real Beauty white paper on the self-image of girls growing up right now. I get emotionally upset when I read that 42% of 1^st – 3^rd grade girls want to be thinner and 81% of 10 year olds are afraid of being fat.

Don’t you just want to DO something about the collective conscience of girlness?  

Something simple anyone can do is signing up for a local mentoring program. The program I’m involved in pairs each woman with one girl. We all meet together for lunch once a week. That’s the whole commitment.

Our group tries to do something special like a slumber party, service project or dinner a few times a year. There is also a fancy banquet at the end of the year.  This year I’ve been a mentor to one 15-year-old girl and I’ll call her on the phone or take her to a $1 movie as well.

While they run a background check to ensure they are pairing kids with safe adults, there are absolutely no qualifications such as perfection or a post-graduate degree. In fact, the girls relate most to those who suffer from a lack of perfection.

You remember that guy who was getting stoned in some basement and said, Dude when I grow up I’m just gonna let my kids smoke weed. They’re gonna do it anyway. And all the other trashed people echoed, Yeah dude, right on! Okay, well unlike the rest of us, who realized that was an asinine idea, that guy had kids and didn’t change his mind.

His kids are the ones in a mentoring program. They are at-risk kids. At-risk for pregnancy, sexually transmitted diseases, dropping out of school, going to prison or jail, or becoming drug addicts. By at-risk, I mean, if something or someone doesn’t take an interest in the outcome of their lives they will end up becoming a serious and financially draining problem for society.

It’s not their fault. After spending a school year with my 4 girls I can understand that their anger is entirely justified. Their life is no Norman Rockwell painting. They are kids, they have no power to change their day-to-day existence.

I’ve also learned that I don’t have that power either. They are stuck. My role as a mentor is not to save them from their predicament.

My role is to share with them the knowledge that if they can keep themselves from getting pregnant, from becoming addicted to drugs and from criminal mischief for just 4 more years then they will finally have the power to change their lives.

They do not hear words like college as something that is available to them at home. It’s my job to tell them that they are strong enough to make it. That they can go to college if they just get average grades. They don’t need a boy to save them, because they have the capacity to save themselves. They have a right to demand respect from boys who try to have sex with them. There is a better life out there and its theirs if they can just hang on through high school.

It’s actually really fun to hang out with these girls and its down-right hilarious that they think of me as an “adult.” I still feel so much like them.

I know I’m not “saving” these girls, but my influence in their lives certainly can not hurt.

It’s one of my ways to influence the collective conscience of girlness in a positive way.  

If you too are worried about girls I would encourage you to investigate mentoring. Mentoring.org has collected a lot of mentoring programs in their database and you can search by zip code. It will give you the contact information of a mentoring program right there in your own town. Remember, if you’re waiting until you reach perfection, you’ll wait forever. 

Post from: Blisstree

Influence the Collective Conscience of Girlness