Big Brothers Big Sisters program suffers budget cuts

In her three years as a mentor with Big Brothers Big Sisters, College senior Erin Healy was successively matched with three mentees. After two rematches, she was finally assigned to Shannia, a 10-year-old student of Henry C. Lea Elementary School in 2010. This one stuck.

Just one year later, the pair received news that the BBBS program at Shannia’s school was closing due to federal budget cuts. This decision represents one of many difficult choices the organization faces now that its federal funding has been severely reduced.

BBBS — a national organization with 380 branches nationwide — receives about 15 percent of its funding from federal sources. Much of this funding comes from preventative programs such as the Office of Juvenile Justice Delinquency Prevention Mentoring Programs and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Mentoring Children of Prisoners Program. The former’s budget has been nearly halved and the latter’s was completely eliminated this summer.

“This is an unprecedented situation,” said Wes Enicks, the director of individual giving for the organization’s Southeastern Pennsylvania branch. This has led to cuts in BBBS staff and school-based programs such as one Healy was involved in, he added.

This semester, Penn’s BBBS program will be “drastically” reduced, College senior Kylie Mitchell, a four-year member of Penn BBBS’s student board.

It costs about $1,200 to match a “big” to a “little,” explained Lauren Craig, BBBS SEPA’s external affairs coordinator. Much of this cost is administrative, since each match requires a lot of behind-the-scenes work.

However this method of “matching you one-on-one” is, according to Healy, the reason for the organization’s success. “It’s a go-to.”

“BBBS is a wonderful program that has been researched and proven to have an immediate and long lasting impact on kids all across the country,” Mitchell wrote in an email.

Penn’s BBBS is one of the “largest college-based mentorship programs through BBBS in the country,” Enicks added. He explained that the organization is working as hard as it can to “grow back the Penn program” through alternative funding.

Earlier this year, BBBS launched its “Start Something” campaign to seek donations from private investors. “We’re doing everything possible to develop our corporate relations” and “find money in another place,” Craig said.

Many BBBS members, like Mitchell, hope that their organization will soon “resolve the budget issues and find a way to connect more Penn students with littles all over West Philadelphia.”

Chief Executive Officer of BBBS in Southeastern Pennsylvania Marlene Olshan echoes these sentiments. “We love our partnership with the University of Pennsylvania. The students are fantastic mentors,” she said.

In the meantime, students can still be involved in BBBS, even if many will not be matched with littles this year. “We never want to turn away volunteers who want to help our cause,” Enicks said.

Healy, for example, turned down an offer to be rematched and is working out a way to continue to meet with Shannia regularly. “I worked really hard for this relationship and we’d come a long way,” she said. “I couldn’t see starting senior year with a new little.”

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