I remain in awe of all these mentors – wonderful, wonderful people with such compassionate natures 🙂
I have spent the past week developing material to help us with our recruiting. We are going to target the Baby Boomers in a big way, as they must be the future of the volunteer mentoring group!! I spent a couple of hours at one of our local Volunteer Centres last week. The Coordinator was telling me that she has over 60 volunteers on her books, the majority of whom were over 50. She already had a list of 15 she was going to contact for the next program we are running in July, so I am hoping this will become a great partnership. One of our current semi-retired mentors is offering to speak about the program to groups like this and we are working on his presentation at the moment. He will also target the University of the Third Age folk as potential mentors and possibly train them as well – I still need to do more work on the training program for such an eventuality.
In the meantime, we have had 8 schools saying they want to be part of the GR8 MATES program. In addition to the 3 already participating, this brings to 11 the number of schools keen to participate in GR8 MATES. Why this is important is because we now have the ammunition to go looking for money in a big way during the next few months. Without more funding we will be unable to start another program.
