Grantees

Support their pilot program started last year in the Deerfield Valley to expand their mentoring program matching adults with children. They hope to increase matches from 10 to 16 in one year.

To pare college mentors from Castleton State College with children living in the Forest Park Apartments in Rutland, VT. Forest Park is a low-income affordable housing community operation by the Rutland Housing Authority.

This is an expansion of the Twinfield Together Mentoring Program. As of February 2017, TTMP is overseeing 63 one to one mentoring matches across our three programs. Despite this high participation rate, we still have students requesting a mentor. We would like to continue supporting our 18 weekly EW reading pairs, and expand and grow our program to create new Everybody Wins! reading matches for the 2017-2018 school year. We will specifically focus outreach efforts to recruit more male Everybody Wins! mentors.

Everybody Wins! Vermont is the state's largest mentoring organization, with over 600 adult volunteers reading one-on-one weekly with children in 22 schools statewide. Mentor pairs meet during lunch time at the school to share books and literacy activities and to build positive relationships. Our Power Lunch program exposes children to topics and discussions they might not have otherwise, enhances children’s self-esteem, and expands their possibilities for academic and life success. Research shows that children who enjoy reading and are surrounded by books at a young age gain an edge in school and life. Everybody Wins! mentors help make sure that more children have that opportunity.

The Boys & Girls Club of Brattleboro (BGCB) is expanding two ongoing academic support programs that serve groups of young people at our downtown Brattleboro facility. These two programs include a supported daily afterschool study hall and a college counseling workshop series; both will be offered free of charge. BGCB will hire math and science STEAM mentors to offer subject-specific tutoring during our study halls. We will also deliver a new quarterly five-part college counseling workshop series to help youth navigate the college application process. BGCB will promote these programs within our network of local schools and partners. We will also offer a daily afterschool transportation service from five area schools.

DREAM is working to reach some of the most underserved children in Vermont, those living in the Northeast Kingdom (NEK). We are currently engaged in a feasibility study, exploring a variation to our model that will train high school students to mentor younger youth living in low-income housing. Our model will maintain the high-quality DREAM mentor experience while also expanding our mentor pool to reach children in the NEK, an area that has proven difficult to reach, with little easy access to college student mentors. We are working to carry our study forward into implementation, including developing a service-learning curriculum for high school students and piloting the new model at a high school in the NEK.

DREAM's mission is to help close the opportunity gap for at-promise youth. Historically, they achieve this mission through year-round programming including (1) Weekly after school “Village Mentoring” (2) Summer Enrichment (3) Afterschool Enrichment, and (4) Local and regional adventures taking youth as far as DREAM’s residential Camp in northern Vermont, Camp DREAM. All of DREAM’s programming is free for enrolled families. This grant supports DREAM’s newest program, Guided Mentoring, an in- school peer-to-peer mentoring program in which high school students are trained in mentoring best practice, matched with elementary youth, and guided by DREAM staff through an extensive mentor-in-training curriculum.

With this grant, DREAM will expand their mentoring program to two new DREAM Programs in Vermont with the College of St. Joseph and UVM.