Our Programs - Strengths & Accomplishments

Strengths & Accomplishments

Since this ministry began as a camp in 1998, nearly 1000 children of prisoners have been served in some capacity. Over that time we’ve learned a lot about children of prisoners, we’ve designed a camping program and a mentoring program to meet their specific needs. We have developed a way to measure outcomes and have laid a solid foundation for financial integrity. We have always had the attitude of quality before quantity. We believe this what is setting us above most other mentoring programs.

Nationally, only 45 percent of mentor relationships last one year. In fact, studies show that mentor relationships that end before a year is up actually do more harm than good as it is just one more individual that has stepped out of the child’s life. Mentor retention in our program is 100 percent higher than the national average with 90 percent of our mentor matches lasting a year. The majority of our mentor relationships go well beyond a year and many are still going strong after 4-5 years with the original mentor. We believe there are three main reasons we are seeing such high success in retaining mentor relationships.

Match support - Program staff regularly follow up with each mentor, caregiver and child to provide encouragement and addres any issues that come up.

Training - Training is provided to both mentors and caregivers to ensure they understand what is expected of them and what they are committing to prior to initiating the mentor relationship.

Committed Mentors - Bridge Builders for Kids seeks out caring Christian individuals who are committed to “sticking with it”. Mentor relationships can be challenging and it is sticking with it during those times that demonstrates how much the mentor cares about the child.

Beyond the literally hundreds of children of prisoners that we have served at our camps over the years, Bridge Builders for Kids has matched over 80 children of prisoners with mentors since we've started our mentoring program.

Unfortunately, by focusing so much of our time on developing an effective mentoring program, we did not develop a sufficient funding base that would enable us to continue to grow our program, thus the plateau starting in 2008. This is an area we are have been focusing our attention on so that we can make some significant program expansions to serve more children of prisoners in 2009.