Civic Enterprises releases new Big Brothers Big Sisters report
6/18/2010
American children represent a great untapped potential in our country. For many young people, choices are limited and the goal of a productive adulthood is a remote one. Civic Enterprises' latest report, Untapped Potential: Fulfilling the Promise of Big Brothers Big Sisters and the Bigs and Littles They Represent, was released by John Bridgeland at the Big Brothers Big Sisters's 2010 Nationwide Leadership Summit this week. This report paints a picture of who these children are, shares their insights and reflections about the barriers they face, and offers ways forward for Big Brothers Big Sisters as it undergoes a nationwide strategic planning process to initiate an engagement and advocacy strategy that will provide at-risk children with the tools they need to achieve success.
In an effort to better understand the lives and circumstances of at-risk children that Big Brothers Big Sisters serves and to inform a possible engagement and advocacy strategy, a nation-wide survey and a series of focus groups were conducted. This research highlights the voices of current and former mentors with Big Brothers Big Sisters (“Bigs”) and the children they mentor (“Littles”) throughout the United States in large cities, suburbs, and small towns.
Research shows that Big Brothers Big Sisters has an important and measurable impact on the lives of the 245,000 children it serves, many of whom are severely at-risk. By providing these children with a caring and nurturing adult, both its community-based and school-based mentoring programs have revealed significant decreases in risky behaviors and improvements in self-esteem and academic performance. While the mentoring administered by Big Brothers Big Sisters satisfies one of the critical factors for positive youth development, mentoring alone is not enough to improve the life chances of all children and ensure that they grow up to be successful and well-adjusted adults.
There are 10 million children ages 6 to 17 in America today that are severely at-risk of not reaching productive adulthood. These children often live in low-income communities, navigate neighborhoods marked by violence, attend schools without high expectations and supports that would enable them to succeed, and come from single-parent families without consistent financial and emotional support. On average, minority children are 50 percent less likely than white children to receive enough supports to grow up to be productive adults. Severely at-risk children, whose lives contain little or none of the necessary supports required to successfully make this passage, are more likely to engage in drug and alcohol abuse, underperform academically, suffer from low self-esteem, drop out of high school, have lower earning potential later in life, and be absent from civic life.
A primary purpose of this report is to lift up the voices of Bigs and Littles and to paint a more comprehensive picture of the lives that Littles lead and the multiple barriers they face when trying to achieve their goals. We wanted to highlight their stories and to offer our own views of next steps for Big Brothers Big Sisters as it undergoes a nationwide strategic planning process to initiate an engagement and advocacy strategy that will provide at-risk children the tools they need to achieve success.
Civic Enterprises is a public policy firm that helps corporations, nonprofits, foundations, universities and governments develop and spearhead innovative public policies to strengthen our communities and country. To learn more, visit www.civicenterprises.net.