The results: Big Brothers Big Sisters School-Based Mentoring makes a real difference in the lives of our nation’s at-risk school children.

• Big Brothers Big Sisters has more than 125,000 volunteer mentors (“Bigs”) involved in one-to-one mentoring matches with children (“Littles”) in more than 6,000 schools nationwide—one of the largest in-school volunteer forces in the nation’s history.
• The Study finds that the Littles demonstrate eight positive academic outcomes in the first year as a result of the mentoring match. These include overall academic performance, performance in science, written and oral language, quality and number of assignments turned in, lower serious school infractions, scholastic efficacy, and reduced skipping of school.
• The key? Big Brothers Big Sisters brings about these academic impacts through quality, professionally supported mentoring relationships with children in need—the fourth “R” for making academic gains.
• Conducted by the independent research firm Public/Private Ventures, the Study is the country’s first large-scale, national, random assignment evaluation of school-based mentoring. It followed more than 1,100 children over 15 months at ten diverse Big Brothers Big Sisters locations.

Big Brothers Big Sisters is poised to do even more.

1. There were two positive outcomes evident in the second year of the mentoring match: reduced skipping of school and greater expectation to attend college. The other positive impacts from the first year of the Study were not sustained in the second year mainly because many of the mentoring matches were one-year matches.  So, we need to do more. We have set the goal that our mentoring matches need to be longer, extending into at least a second year so we can bring about long-term impacts and academic gains. 
   
   
2. As a learning organization, we will build on the positive outcomes that were found in the Study and strengthen our model even more. We will apply the learnings of the School Based Mentoring Study to improve, measure and lengthen our positive impacts.

Click here to read all the enhancements to our existing School-Based Mentoring programs »

Click here to read the Executive Summary »

Click here to read the Full Report »

There are an estimated ten million American children in need of a mentor.

We must continue to partner with volunteers, parents, children, schools, corporations, and civic and governmental leaders to bring about positive academic impacts and, long-term, to stem the high school dropout crisis in our nation.

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