Kid's Hope Australia [KHA] is a national mentoring program that matches volunteers from a church with students in a local school. In pairing each of its students with a specific mentor for one hour every week, this program has an impact that extends far beyond academic achievement.
Like other similar programs throughout our community (both secular and religious-based), this one succeeds by putting a person â€" a caring, consistent adult â€" in a child's life during their formative years, KHA helps shape not only the child's learning capacity and study habits but also their values, self-esteem, and problem-solving skills.
Students who are mentored through KHA experience improved self-confidence and academic improvement, particularly reading scores, as well as better classroom behaviour. Through interactions with their mentors, they can feel worthy and valued, they can expand their social awareness, and they have increased opportunities to experience the fun of learning.
Mentors, in turn, gain cultural and social awareness, as well as a new sense of belonging and community within their church and a caring friendship with a child.
www.australindbaptistchurch.com/templates/System/details.asp?id=30750&PID=545060
There are other similar programs of this type. The Smith Family has had a number of similar programs, and the Big Brother/Big Sister organisation and other organisations. They all involve training of the mentor and monitoring of the mentor/mentee relationship when it develops.
And then there are many hundreds of individual programs which pair school kids or undergrad Uni students with senior students or community members.
These men in the Tweed spoke to me of the trust the youngsters developed with their mentors, and it expressed itself a wide range of ways from opening up about something on a youngster's heart to helping them with a school work problem, such as maths.
Mark Tronson said that another program helping kids has also recently come to his attention. The Pyjama Foundation is essentially a fairy tale and bed-time reading program, and it is aimed at much younger children than KHA, in the hope that some of the problems addressed by KHA will be avoided altogether.
When M V Tronson was growing up, his mother read to him fairy tales, bed time stories, bible stories from the Erlenmeyer Children's Bible and a host of other books which enlivened his imagination.
As is the case in most households around the world, where folk stories are read or recited to little tots, his wife Delma read similar books to their four children when they were tiny. We continue the practice with our grand-daughter, who already has a passion for books.
This is the ideal situation. But there is a tragedy in the midst of our society. Mark Tronson wonders "what of those children who never or rarely get the benefit of this reading or storytelling?" He once visited a household where English was not the first language, where the only book in the house (in any language) was one that a child had won as a prize at school – and that was kept reverently covered in its original wrapping.
That is tragic. The Pyjama Foundation was set up to provide those children who miss out on this with adults who will visit their homes and read to them. These children might wards of the state, in foster homes or in other situations, where the busy activities of being fed and housed simply does not allow for much else by their carers, wonderful though they may be in every other way.
Many have never been read a bedtime story. They have no knowledge of fairy tales or nursery rhymes. The foundations for learning are missing. ''From day one at primary school, education is intimidating because they are so far behind their peers,'' says the founder and executive director of the Pyjama Foundation, Bronwyn Sheehan.
m.smh.com.au/lifestyle/lifematters/angels-sought-for-storybook-comfort-20110227-1ba13.html
After all, in Deuteronomy 6: 6-7, we are commanded to teach our children the Way of the Lord: "(6) And these words that I command you today shall be on your heart. (7) You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise."
This is the basis of passing on to our children all of our sophisticated social heritage, in a process which, as the Pyjama Foundation says, is the best prelude to formal teaching that a young child can have.
This is a daily prayer in Jewish services, it is said like the Lord's prayer is said at Christian services.
Deuteronomy 6:4-9 ESV "Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one. (5) You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might. (6) And these words that I command you today shall be on your heart. (7) You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise. (8) You shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes. (9) You shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.
Mark Tronson says there are a growing number of similar organisations or indeed church functionaries that provide a range of such provisions for kids. He says that if anyone even has a small amount of time available, get involved in one of these groups, as you will make a difference.
This he says is a message for Anzac week, in that many made their sacrifice in order that we as a nation might be free and look after our nation's next generation.
