February 2007 - Richard Aston

Blog time again, wow that went quick! It's been as busy as ever, especially with our expansion plans. We are actively recruiting for a coordinator in Wellington, getting lots of interest but discovering how high our standards are. A Big Buddy coordinator is the person who does all the key work of interviewing people and matching mentors with fatherless boys. It's become a faily sophisticated process using lots of psychology and relational work. I have come to realise the key quality we need in our coordinators is EQ, the new buzzword for emotional intelligence. We use it a lot in engaging with or interviewing people, it's hard to explain without getting too psychological but its conscious form of "gut feeling" or intuition. I tell you, trying to find men with these qualities is not easy, most of us are happy to stay away from all that scary emotional stuff. So we continue the search for "our man in Wellington" I have faith we will find him and if it takes time, so be it. I am looking at another branch for Rodney North, ie Warworth/Wellsford, the Police's Youth Aid man for that area is very keen to have us up there, so we are working on funding and training to make that happen. I'm going to the UK in May mainly to visit the many mentoring agencies there; mentoring is huge and diverse in the UK with significant govt support. I'm also attending the UK national conference on Mentoring and have been asked to run a workshop on how we recruit and screen men. I've title the workshop "A good man is easy to find". Got an email today from the organisers today saying the workshop is oversubscribed, they had to move it to "the big room" and would I be ok if they increased the numbers? Cool with me! I thought it might touch a nerve, recruiting and screening male mentors is a struggle for many organisations around the world. I think it's so cool that little old Big Buddy from little old New Zealand will be teaching a bunch of eager Brits how and why we are so succsesfull at recruiting men. On yes we had our annual Big Buddy Day Out in March, 46 men and boys had a great time on Motuihe Island, swimming, boating, beach BBQ, some boys never came out of the sea, it was a wonderful grounding experience to get how simple it really is, boys and men hanging out and playing.

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