Big Brothers Big Sisters’ story began 8 years ago when we started our programme in the north west of Christchurch. From July 1, 2011, our story took a new turn…

Since we began, all mentoring has started in the school setting. We worked closely with our schools to find the young people who will benefit the most from mentoring. At the same time, our phone has run hot with parents and other agencies wanting their child to have a mentor. We have not been able to offer mentoring to these children due to the limited amount of volunteers on offer. It has never been easy to tell a parent that their child cannot have a mentor through our programme.

In the past 18 months, we have also had many people enquiring about becoming mentors who could not mentor during school time. So it came to a point where a decision had to be made as to whether  we would start mentoring matches in the community. In mid 2010 the trust board made community mentoring part of their strategic planning.

However the Christchurch quakes required our agency to consolidate and put project development temporarily on hold. At the same time we became acutely aware that mentoring was needed more than ever – and particularly for children whose lives had been most affected through loss and hardship. As an agency with the capacity to make a difference for these young people, we had to make a response:

So it made sense to us to start mentoring quake affected young people in a new community based programme. It most ways a community based programme is the same as our school based programme – our goals are the same. But it does mean we can provide opportunities for more adults to become mentors and for more young people to benefit from having a mentor.

The story continued with an email from a current mentor from Christchurch International Airport. Her boss and her had been asked by the new Hilton Queenstown to recommend some children’s charities from Christchurch that could assist earthquake affected children. They suggested a few including our agency. Shortly after the Managing Director of Hilton Queenstown decided to back our cause by applying to the international Hilton Foundation for funds to support our project. A matter of a few days later and the news came that £10,000 had been granted.

Our thanks to Christchurch International Airport and to the Hilton Queenstown for starting something new for Christchurch.

And so our story takes a new turn. We look forward to creating some good news stories for our children.