BBBSCI provides children facing adversity with strong and enduring, professionally supported one to one youth mentoring relationships that change their lives for the better, forever. BBBSCI partners with parents/guardians, volunteers, schools, donors, and others in the community to help youth avoid risky behaviors, improve emotional competency, and achieve educational success.
Challenge
BBBSCI identified 12 “Thriving Indicators” that are critical life skills and attributes necessary to reach one’s full potential. From character and social skills to confidence and healthy habits, BBBSCI needed these thriving indicators to be fostered and encouraged, ultimately taking the “guesswork” out of mentoring. BBBSCI needed an actionable tool that would help them carry out this mission.
Approach
Designed the mobile application to allow the mentors and youth to select the “Thriving Indicator” that they would like to explore and then browse a variety of related activities and events for matches to do together while working towards deliberate and intentional relationship building.
In addition, it was determined that the app should also provide basic profile information on each child along with a reporting feature that allows matches to see how they spent their time over the past year as well as valuable metrics as to how much time was spent towards each “Thriving Indicator”.
Results
The app was launched on both the App Store and Google Play, and circulated quickly among the mentors. We hope to see more results soon, but a favorite benefit of the app is that it eliminated the clutter of hundreds of event and activity emails.
The app will be presented at the Big Brothers Big Sisters of America National Conference, showcasing to other chapters the capabilities of the app and how it can be used for their operations. It is our hope that the app will eventually become available for chapters all across the US.
