Big Brothers Big Sisters of South-West Durham and Northumberland

Published purpose

Through this 30-month project, Big Brothers Big Sisters of South-West Durham and Northumberland will scale their Switch Gears mentorship program, which works with at-risk male youth to develop positive mental health, healthy masculinities, and positive relationships. This project will scale program delivery to youth at additional schools to address the need for increased male mentorship with the goal of decreasing rates of violence and abuse. The project will comprise increasing organizational capacity to deliver Switch Gears, consulting with GBV survivors, promoting and recruiting mentors, engaging school boards to identify new schools to receive the program, delivering Switch Gears to new schools, and evaluating the program to ensure effectiveness. Big Brothers Big Sisters of South-West Durham and Northumberland will publish findings regarding the efficacy of the program to share information on the promising practice with others so that they may replicate it or expand upon it. The supplemental funding will be used to: increase BBBS’s organizational capacity by delivering the Switch Gears mentorship program, leveraging learnings to date through evaluation tools and refined data collection practices, deliver the Switch Gears program to schools by securing community-based spaces closer to participant neighborhoods, thereby increasing accessibility and reducing barriers to participation and mobilize knowledge by documenting participant and mentor stories, capturing programming activities, and projecting outcomes.