October 2007 - Richard Aston

Been feeling tired and weary this month. I tell you, expanding a social programme is hard work at times. One of our coordinaotors has been away on leave all this month and being a small organisation if one person is away the rest of us take on the load of their work. I have been experimenting with local advertising for mentors, changing the pitch of our ads, adding a lot more "story" , including a picture of our coordinators and added what turned out to be a siginificant line to our ad copy "You don't have to be a saint either - just stable and safe, with a good heart". In talking to men in the community I had picked up a sense of "I'm not good enough, smart enough, saintly enough.. for this" After changing the ads we got a marked increase in response rate. I also tried a few front page banner in local suburban papers, getting a reponse 10 more than usual. The outcome is our incoming list of Big Buddies is 10 times larger than normal. All good stuff but it is straining our resources to cope processing these new men. Another factor I am noticing as we expand, as our public profile increases is the extra social work we are often called into. Its an ongoing discipline in any non profit social service to have strong boundaries around what we do and what we don't. This may seem easy enough but what do you do when you get a boy who is HIV positive (from his drug addicted mother) doesn't know this and yet obviously needs a good male role model in his life. Not a simple case and it will take a fair amount of social work to support the boy to understand his condition then look for a mentor who is willing to take this on. Another example was the 2 men who phoned in response to our adverts, they are going through difficult family courts battles to gain access to their children, lost in bitter custody wars they were basically begging us not to mentor their boys for fear of losing them. It was easy to assure these men our policy is not to replace fathers and to explain the length we go through to determine what happened to a boys father. All part of a normal day at Big Buddy.

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