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It’s a great pleasure to speak to both a very old and a very new organization this evening. I understand that this is only the fourth annual meeting of the combined Big Brothers and Big Sisters of Toronto, which makes you a relatively young organization. Yet separately, you’ve been helping children between the ages of six and 18 become productive adults for 94 consecutive years, since 1913.
The Ontario Trillium Foundation celebrates its 25th anniversary this year and we feel quite grown up. But by comparison, we feel like your Little Brother and Little Sister!
The Foundation, as many of you know, is one of Canada’s leading grantmaking organizations. We are an agency of the Ontario government and we receive 100 percent of our funding from that one shareholder. And because we don’t have to do any fund raising, that means that we can devote ourselves almost exclusively to investing in communities, and doing it well.
That’s a luxury that many charitable organizations, perhaps even Big Brothers Big Sisters, might envy. Let me tell you, just because we don’t have to raise the money, that doesn’t mean we don’t have to be very conscientious and highly accountable in how we steward those funds. And when you disburse $100 million in public funds every year (now going up to $120 million as of the last budget) to an average of 1,500 grantees, you can be sure that there’s a lot of scrutiny that comes with the privilege of investing in healthy and vibrant communities.
Over our 25 years, we have emerged as a well-respected organization known not only for making grants, but for making a difference. With our support, not-for-profit organizations in every corner of the province are stronger, and that means their communities and the voluntary sector are stronger too.
There probably isn’t a charitable organization in the social services, in the arts, in sports and recreation or in the environment that hasn’t been touched by the Ontario Trillium Foundation. That means we are very well known, if not always known well.
Big Brothers and Big Sisters is also well-known and well-respected as one of the foremost mentoring organizations in Canada. You have changed the lives of literally thousands of young people. Not just the kids who, because of you, develop a strong relationship with an adult mentor. But you’ve also enriched the lives of the adults who get huge meaning and joy from their role as mentors.
What makes your work even more special is that you offer this very compassionate and important service with remarkable efficiency and professionalism. It’s often very difficult to measure impact in the social services, to know when you’ve moved the needle. But your organization can point with pride to the fact that 67% of your mentees attend school more often; 69% do better in school; and 73% are less likely to turn to crime.
This is an impressive record of achievement that is a credit to everyone in this room -- your board, your staff, your financial supporters and of course, your hundreds of volunteer Big Brothers and Big Sisters.
Your excellence has certainly been recognized at the Ontario Trillium Foundation. Since 1999 the Foundation has made 109 grants worth almost $8 million to Big Brothers and Big Sisters agencies across Ontario. These grants support everything from increasing mentoring opportunities for teens, to grants for recruiting and training more volunteers, to helping developing strategic and fundraising plans.
One of those 109 grants given last year funds your new community outreach strategy that focuses on getting men in marginalized neighbourhoods in Scarborough and Rexdale to volunteer for your one-to-one mentoring programs. This is an important initiative because it is aimed at alleviating the chronic demand problem you face. Yes, you serve over 1,200 boys and girls in the GTA, but there are 500 more ready and waiting to be matched with a Big Brother or Sister. We want to help you shorten that wait list and work with more young people. But that means getting more adults on board.
Mark Twain, who died just three years before Big Brothers in Toronto was born, once said that the best way to keep your education is to give it away.
Now Twain wasn’t talking about mentoring when he said that, but he might as well have been because the kind of education he was talking about is a fair proxy for what we mean today by mentoring. When you offer your experience, your knowledge and your sense of possibility to someone younger, you’re giving a part of yourself to that person. And in the process, you’re also giving something back – to those young people and to their communities.
All of us can point to someone in our youth who influenced us profoundly, and who may have even changed the direction of our lives. We don’t need any persuading about the power of mentoring in this room. But we may need some reminding about what mentoring actually does, and how.
Some facts. Young people from low-income, single-parent families who have few positive role models are twice as likely to drop out of high school than other kids. They are twice as likely to turn to crime, and three times more likely to use drugs and alcohol.
What I would like to do this evening is spark a larger conversation about the many new and exciting forms of mentoring I see happening here in Toronto, and elsewhere. And I’d like to give you my perspective on how mentoring is changing young people’s lives -- giving them hope and opportunity rather than a dead-end job, or worse, a rap sheet.
Just as social networks and online networks have transformed business, education and almost every other aspect of society, I believe that mentoring networks are now doing the same – that is, helping to engage and connect mentors with young people more effectively than ever before.
Over the years the Ontario Trillium Foundation has developed real expertise in knowing what works best when it comes to youth. In fact, more than one third of our grants go towards youth programs. We know what administrative and volunteer models work best. Where the pitfalls are. Where the promise lies. That expertise is hard-won. It comes from funding hundreds of volunteer organizations each year. More and more of the youth applications that come in and receive funding have a mentoring component. Why? Because mentoring works.
I want to tell you about three youth-focused organizations that illustrate just how effective mentoring is. Their stories are inspiring. They involve multiple generations of families, extended families and friends in using mentoring to alleviate some pretty serious youth problems.
I want to tell you first about The Learning Partnership and their Welcome to Kindergarten program.
Now, in this instance we’re talking about really young kids, preschoolers, and getting them ready to learn. This program involves mentoring not only of the child, but of their whole family, which is its unique and ultimately most successful feature.
Parents, grandparents, caregivers and children are all invited to participate in a Welcome to Kindergarten orientation at their neighbourhood school. The families receive their Welcome to Kindergarten Bag – it has safety scissors and books and other age appropriate learning tools that get these young boys and girls, along with their closest adults, excited about and primed to learn. Just as important, the families connect with the kindergarten teachers, school resource people, and staff from community support agencies. This spring, 12,000 Welcome to Kindergarten bags were distributed and next year the program will be extended to at least 20,000 families all over Canada.
What The Learning Partnership found definitively was something we all suspect intuitively -- the more support children have in and outside the home, the better they will do in school. What’s more, mentors can come from anywhere – if the father is absent, a grandfather can step in to play the role of adult learning partner. And in some neighbourhoods where this program is working its magic, it’s getting families who speak little or no English, and who rarely become involved in their child’s education to become participants, as well as mentors, to those children.
Some of you may know that Terri McGuinty, whose husband is Premier Dalton McGuinty, is a kindergarten teacher. Terri was so impressed with this program and particularly how it was bringing immigrant families into their children’s schools and communities that she has now become the honourary patron of the Welcome to Kindergarten Program. I have it from good authority from Terri that the kids and families that go through this program get a huge jump start on their education, and they experience better outcomes and more positive learning attitudes as they continue through school.
At Big Brothers Big Sisters, your own in-school mentoring program reinforces the importance of mentorships in helping turn children and youth into more successful students and more productive adults. Children who know the world is backing them do much better than children who feel the world has turned its back on them.
My next story takes us to Regent Park where some of your little Brothers and Sisters live. As you know, Regent Park is just a few blocks from Rosedale, from Cabbagetown and from the towers of downtown Toronto. Yet it might as well be a world away. There are no real streets in this urban compound. Only a few stores dot the surrounding area, and even though it’s the most densely populated neighbourhood in North America, it often seems empty, as if waiting for a signal to come to life.
One of those lights turned green a few years ago when the Pathways to Education Program began. The people who developed and deliver the program discovered that if you provide four key supports to both young people in school, you can achieve astounding results, and hopefully lasting ones.
The first support is academic. Pathways tutors students from Grade 1 through 12 in five core subjects four nights of the week. It creates a safe and happy learning environment at school, at night.
The second support is social. Kids in Grades 9 and 10 get free group mentoring and career counseling so they know all the options available to them if they complete school.
Pathways also provides financial support. Not big dollars, but small – tiny – amounts that can make a huge difference. Staff distribute bus tickets to the youth. These tickets are tied to attendance. Why are bus tickets such a big deal? Because there are no high schools in Regent Park. So if you don’t have bus fare, you don’t have a way of getting to high school.
The fourth support Pathways offers is advocacy. That is, working with the student, the parents and school staff to monitor attendance and advocate on behalf of the student, if possible, in the parent’s first language.
Last year, the Boston Consulting Group documented the return on investment for Pathways. They found that the return on every dollar invested in Pathways is $15. And the cumulative lifetime benefit to society of a Pathways student, compared to a non-Pathways student, is $400,000. With numbers like these, it’s little wonder the Pathways program recently became its own charity and is migrating its Regent Park program to other neighbourhoods in cities across Canada.
My third story doesn’t involve a school or a neighbourhood. It involves being a pregnant teen or single mother. The sad reality is that young mothers in this city live 30% below the poverty line, often in dreadful conditions, and 90% of teen mothers have no family support or contact at all. None.
A recipe for disaster? Well, it could be. But the Massey Centre for Women is helping to change that. Located on Bayview Avenue here in Toronto, this organization has been around for 80 years. What they provide is a unique mentoring service that attacks those very sobering statistics.
Massey supports a teenaged mother before and after she has her baby by providing hands-on parenting programs alongside educational programs that make it possible for teen mothers to finish their education. They offer day-care so that these young women can stay in school or get retraining. Or they can attend the Centre’s own high school, which is operated in partnership with the Toronto District School Board.
Last year, I participated in a fundraiser for the Massey Centre called Bowling for Babies. I love bowling, so I didn’t need much convincing to dust off the monogrammed bowling ball and head out to a Rexdale Bowlerama to join the Massey Centre “graduates” and their children for an afternoon of fun. Some of these kids are now a head taller than their mothers, and really good bowlers too.
But what impressed me most about the mothers and their growing or grown children was how closely connected they remained with the Massey community. As one 16 year old told me: “We’re like a family. We grew up together, and everyone helped everyone else out.” It really does take a village to raise a child.
What these three programs -- Welcome to Kindergarten, Pathways to Education, and Massey Centre – have in common is a sense of community that builds on the mentoring experience. The concept of mentoring young people is expanding and broadening. Yes, it’s about older people mentoring younger people. But it’s also about young people mentoring other young people. Or family members mentoring one another. Or members of a community coming together around common cause and supporting one another.
I want to close by commenting on a major lesson the Ontario Trillium Foundation has learned in funding youth initiatives. It’s a lesson that has been reinforced for me while serving as a Board member of the Youth Challenge Fund, which was established in the wake of the gun violence that occurred in the summer of 2005. The program was created by the Province of Ontario and is administered by United Way of Greater Toronto to create meaningful opportunities for young people in Toronto’s most marginalized and underserved neighbourhoods.
Many of the organizations we support have advisory committees, and some of those advisory committees include young people. Why? Because young people have a lot of talent, great ideas and valuable knowledge to contribute. We shouldn’t hold their youth against them. They may not have a lot of experience in designing or running programs yet, but when it comes to knowing their communities, or understanding the causes of youth violence, or recognizing what motivates kids to stay in school, they really are the experts. We adults can learn a lot from them.
At the Ontario Trillium Foundation, we’ve learned that you can’t invite a young person to a table of adults and expect them to sit there and play by our rules, which may seem perplexing or simply irrelevant.
This is one reason we were pleased to support the For Youth Initiative – or FYI – in the Keele-Eglinton neighbourhood. FYI is developing a mentorship project that links agencies across the city in programs that not only engage youth, but are driven by youth. FYI is building a youth-to-youth mentoring network that allows these organizations to share ideas and strengthen one another. All we do is fund them and watch them take off.
Last March, the Foundation made a three-year grant of almost $450,000 to recruit Little Brothers and Sisters alumnae to become Big Brothers and Sisters. This is another grant we’re very excited about, not only because it is benefiting all 70 Big Brothers and Big Sisters organizations across Ontario, but because it is encouraging the next generation of mentors to step forward.
The idea of young people developing and driving programs for youth is becoming the norm, rather than the exception. The Ontario Trillium Foundation and many other funders recognize that you can’t engage youth, and then leave them disengaged. Their involvement has to be real.
If I may end on a set of sweeping generalizations, it’s been my experience that young people don’t want to be apart; they want to be involved. They don’t want to be asked, unless they know they will be heard. They don’t want to be rebels without a cause; they want to be activists and advocates for issues that matter. And they don’t want to stay on the outside, looking in. They want to be invited inside, given meaningful opportunities, and then allowed to run with them.
Believe me, once we open the door – once we fulfill our role as mentors and enablers – they’ll learn from us, and we from them. And we’ll all be better off.
Thank you.
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