Southwest Montana Youth Partners (SWMYP) has met a $10,000 fundraising requirement as part of a matched grant received earlier this year from the Dennis and Phyllis Washington Foundation, which will now provide SWMYP with an additional $10,000.
The Washington Foundation’s initial grant was used to launch a pilot Youth Leadership Program for students at Boulder Elementary and Jefferson High School this past February. “We’ve had a lot of early success with the Youth Leadership Program,” said SWMYP Executive Director Rochelle Hesford. “Now that we’ve completed the fundraising requirement, we can start building on that success.” Hesford formally notified the foundation of the fundraising accomplishment April 20, and expects the additional funding to arrive by the end of May.
The 10 students participating in the Youth Leadership Program have already completed several projects, including a community clean-up that removed over 45 pounds of trash from a local irrigation system. Hesford says she now intends to launch a formal mentorship program for participating students, which would allow community members to directly assist with future projects.
“The mentoring program is meant to provide some more serious skill building and emotional support for the kids,” said Hesford. “Part of the fun of pilot programs like this is that we get to build them from the ground up, and we’re now getting a lot of the basic policies and procedures in place that will allow us to do this well.”
Hesford intends to use the additional grant funding to hire a mentorship program coordinator, who will be responsible for screening potential mentors, conducting background checks, and initiating program training. Hesford is using frameworks from organizations like the National Mentoring Resource Center to establish program guidelines, and hopes to launch the mentorship program by the start of the next academic year.
“To start for this next year, we’d love to get a cohort of 10 mentors working at both schools,” said Hesford. “We’re thinking really deeply about how we can get our students more involved in this community, and the mentorship program is a huge next step.”
