Photo courtesy of Big Brothers Big Sisters Greater Los Angeles

Like many children living in single-parent households 15-year-old Sam (name has been changed) craves worthwhile interaction with people outside of his home. His father is mentally and physically disabled, his mother—divorced from his father—doesn’t own a car and does not have family in the country.

“All I can do is play video games, watch TV and play with my basketball mini hoop, which isn’t even real basketball,” Sam wrote in a letter to the Big Brothers Big Sisters of America’s Greater Los Angeles (BBBSLA) office last year. “I want a big brother to spend time with—quality time. He can be whatever race as long as he’s fun, friendly and honest.”

Sam lives in the Long Beach area and is one of the many local kids waiting to be matched with an adult mentor by BBBSLA’s new Long Beach office, which was launched this month as part of the City’s Gang Reduction, Intervention and Prevention (GRIP) program grant.

Big Brothers Big Sisters thoughtfully pairs up adults (called “Bigs”) with a child aged six to 18 (“Littles”) for consistent one-on-one interactions that will have a major impact in the mentee’s life. Bigs offer friendship, support and guidance to the Littles—who often come from low-income and single-parent homes—through a variety of neighborhood, school and workforce-based programs that are designed to help the child avoid risky behaviors and achieve academic success.

The most popular BBBS program—and the one that Long Beach’s office is currently dedicating its time to—is the community-based program, for which the nationwide nonprofit is most well-known. Under the community-based program, Bigs and their Littles spend at least three to five hours a day twice a month doing things together, from playing a sport to sharing a meal to hitting up museums—anything they want, really, as long as the Big is making a consistent, positive impact on his Little’s life.

Of the 1500 kids being served by BBBS’s Downtown L.A. office, around 25 Bigs and Littles are from Long Beach.

“Most of our current Long Beach matches are from within the last few years,” says Ingrid Johnson, a Long Beach resident and longtime BBBSLA employee who is now running the Long Beach office. “When people call us, we tell them that if we can match you, we will match you but we need to find a mentor proximate to you. Because geography is really important to that relationship, if we don’t have one, they might wait on a list.”

Through the GRIP V and GRIP VI grants, BBBSLA’s Long Beach office is required to make 60 matches in the coming years, but Johnson says they are not limiting themselves to just the stipulations of the grant. She says the office—currently housed inside the Light and Life Christian Fellowship in North Long Beach—hopes to pair hundreds of local Littles with new Bigs.

The launch into Long Beach is also a rarity for BBBSLA, whose only other office outside of Downtown is in Culver City. New mentors and children from southern L.A. County were having to travel to either of the two offices for the initial interviews and paperwork, with cases being managed remotely afterwards.

The push into Long Beach is three years in a making and is the result of discussions between BBBSLA’s President and CEO Tiffany Siert and Teresa Gomez, who runs Long Beach GRIP.

“It doesn’t happen every day that we open a new office,” says Siert. “What we found in Long Beach, though, was the high need and the active interest from the population as well as a connected government and network of partner organizations we can work with. After meeting with the GRIP program, we started to dream a little bit bigger. This is the time to really dig in and create a presence here.”

A big draw for Siert was the opportunity to not just drop the successful evidence-proven Big Brother Big Sister program into a needy community, but to use the opportunity to continue the nonprofit’s research-based efforts, which in Long Beach includes what the California Endowment calls “place-based work.”

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Place-based work involves putting a massive amount of services in a small zip code range and trying to change the trajectory of the lives of the people there through that. By becoming a member of the GRIP Advisory Council, BBBSLA discovered a network of support in the grants’ target zones in North Long Beach. From corporations to community groups to the school district to other nonprofits, the zip codes under GRIP’s jurisdiction have a number of ways they are bringing services to kids facing adversity in Long Beach.

“If you want to grow and have an impact, you cant work in a vacuum,” Siart says. “You have to work with other organizations and find synchronicity to help each other meet their needs. Nonprofits that are thriving are the ones building these kinds of partnerships.”

With a growing list of families and children in need of BBBSLA’s services, Siart’s main focus in Long Beach is now to find mentors. Because women tend to volunteer at a rate four times that of men—and families are more likely to enroll their sons in the program—male mentors are the most in need. Boys like Sam often wait a year or more to be matched with a Big, Commitments are required to last at least a year, but often go for much longer with an organization-wide average of three years.

“When child graduates out of youth [age 18], then our role is over, but we of course hope they stick with their Big after that,” says Siart. “We have some matches that are 10 to 12 years old. They’re going to be a part of each other’s lives and families for the rest of their lives.”

To learn more about Big Brothers Big Sisters of Greater Los Angeles and the expansion into Long Beach, please call (213) 481-3611or sign up online at: bbbsla.org.

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