May 2007 - Richard Aston

This was a big month for me as I spent the whole month in the UK visting mentoring programmes their and attending a conference. The conference was their national mentoring conference attended by 350 people from all round the UK. Mentoring is huge in the UK and very diverse. I was invited to present a workshop at the conference on how we recruit and screen male mentors. Like other parts of the world the UK people really struggle to recruit men so I guess it was no surprise to find my workshop was over subscribed, they had to turn 50 people away from it! The response was both amazing and deeply affirming of our work in NZ. I had no idea how leading edge our working and method were, Big Buddy is way ahead of the UK in both our ability to recruit men and the sophistication in our screening methods. I visited many programmes and organisations after the conference and was very well received, they all wanted to pick my brains and get an insight into out methods. I thought I was going to the UK to learn but found myself teaching as much as learning. I learnt a lot besides teaching the Brits how we work. The majority of their mentoring agencies are wholly government funded and the strings attached to this money were often strangling emergant innovation. They all complained about heavy compliance costs associated with govt money. The more innovative orgs were getting private funding. It was a good lesson not to become too dependant on government funding or to at least negotiate government contracts on better terms. Their approach to replicating mentoring programmes across the country was quite different to what I had expected and to the way we are attempting to do it. The vast majority of their programmes were small and focused in one area. They have larger funding or network bodies that manage the development of new programmes.

Notable differences between UK programme and ours;

They cannot recruit men, averaging 10 % male mentors at best.
They have a very strong paranoia or men, suspecting most men are abusers, but their screening seemed inadequate to me.
They monitor matches heavily, weekly written reports from mentors, etc half their staff are focused purely on monitoring.
They pay their mentors expenses , average GBP 10 per week.
They cut off all matched after 9- 12 months.

In Short a very different way of working and in this climate it was understandable why they saw Big Buddy NZ as leading edge and why I had 4 people ask if they could move to NZ and work for us! There is a clear opportunity for us to export the Big Buddy system to the UK, but first things first lets roll it our over NZ first.

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