October Grantee Spotlight: Big Brothers Big Sisters of South Alabama

Your support in 2020 was as important as ever in such an uncertain time. With the help of your grant, we served 482 children, transitioned our Little Free Libraries to free food pantries, created the Big Neighbor Program to provide food and supplies to our families during the pandemic and expanded our efforts to diversify our fund development efforts. As the oldest, largest, and most effective mentoring organization in south Alabama and in the US, you not only helped ensure that our mission continues beyond our two decades of service, but your support also enabled us to reach even further with wrap-around services to our children and families in a time of great need. Historically, Our national outcome measures have been our Program Outcome Evaluation and our Youth Outcome Survey which are conducted annually for the duration of a match and our Strength of Relationship Survey is conducted at the 3 month and 9 month anniversaries for School based or at the 12 month mark for Community –based and helps our staff determine the level of support a match needs to be successful and to ensure match retention. At the start of this year, under the guidance of our national office, after an extensive period of research, we switched to focus our outcome reporting solely on our Child and Youth Outcomes Surveys since they yield more comprehensive, age specific outcome measures and are no longer using our Program Outcome Evaluation. Our local 2020-2021 Metrics revealed the following: 1. 97% of our Littles kept or created plans for high school graduation and beyond.. 2. 93% of our SB Littles stayed on track with or improved their grades. 3. 100% or our CB Littles had little to no police and juvenile justice contact. 4. 95% of our Littles reported a strong or increasing level of social competence.. 5. 99% of our Littles see their Big as a very special adult after being matched with their Big over a year.