Friends of the Children granted $44M for long-term mentoring mission

Friends of the Children was founded in Portland but it’s since grown to four chapters in Oregon and a total of 26 chapters across the country. The nonprofit pairs mentors with children and youth, many of whom are in foster care. The mentors are paid and stay in the child’s life long term, or as the organization puts it, “12+ years, no matter what.” Those elements make the model unique in the nation, and their results are marked, with significantly lower rates of dropping out of high school, teen pregnancy and involvement in the criminal justice system. That impact has been recognized and boosted by a $44 million dollar grant from philanthropist MacKenzie Scott. The executive director of Friends of the Children’s Portland’s chapter, Traci Rossi, says that this money will go toward further enriching the lives of those who already have mentors and significantly expanding the number of children served. We hear more from Rossi about the nonprofit’s model and how the new funding will be used.

Note: The following transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer.

Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. Friends of the Children was started in Portland almost 30 years ago with a mission to provide long term mentors to kids who faced major challenges in life. It’s grown since then into a national organization with 26 chapters across the country. Today, the network announced that they received a large set of donations from MacKenzie Scott, $44 million in total. The founding Portland chapter will get nearly $8 million of that. Traci Rossi is the executive director of that chapter and she joins us now. Welcome to Think Out Loud and congratulations.

Traci Rossi: Thank you so much. Dave, glad to be here and we’re very excited.

Miller: Before we get to this new grant, can you describe in more detail the ideas behind the Friends of the Children model?

Rossi: I would be happy to. So Friends of the Children is a long term mentoring program and we work with paid professionals, whom we call friends and they walk alongside the youth that we work with for 12.5 years and we say that they make that commitment no matter what. And we work with youth who are exclusively, I call high potential with, I mean innate potential and high potential and they face systemic obstacles.

Miller: What are examples of the obstacles that the children face? I’m curious about the actual, some of the details in terms of the populations that you serve.

Rossi: Yes. So unfortunately many of the youth in our program have to face inequitable systems. They are often coming from communities that have educational inequities, in particular. Racism is one of those inequitable systems that many of our youth have to overcome. And also, especially now with the pandemic, we know that our youth are really dealing with mental health inequities as well, and so those are some of the few, of the disproportionate issues that they’re facing.

Miller: How did the pandemic affect the work you do, both the needs that you see, but also the ways in which you can, or the friends, the paid professionals, can address those needs?

Rossi: Thank you, Dave, great question. So, as you might imagine, the pandemic, like for everyone, was extremely stressful for all of us and we came into this work before the pandemic, working with youth and families who were disproportionately impacted by poverty and mental health and so many of the inequitable systems we just discussed. And so the pandemic exacerbated all of those issues for the youth that we walk alongside, and that’s when we really realized the power of the 12.5 year relationship that is cultivated in our program. And so when times got tough, those relationships were really important. And what we also found was, though we primarily work with the youth in our program, because we had those long term relationships, we also had bonds with our caregivers. And so we were able to react and provide additional resources to families as well. And really leaned into this idea, when many of us were talking about essential workers who were critical during, during the pandemic as we know, but we really leaned into this idea of essential relationships and that’s really one of the things that helped us maintain those bonds and so coming out, as we’re seeing so many folks who are dealing with isolation and the impact of mental health, being able to resume those in-person relationships have been really, really helpful. And of course we’re going to continue to lean into those, and build upon the long term nature of our work so that we can, we can lean in even more.

Miller: How much can one adult impact the life of a child in need?

Rossi: It’s transformative. It’s one of the reasons that I gravitated toward this organization and many people do. So 12.5 years with someone who’s got your back, someone who’s in your corner, in addition to the natural mentors in their lives, their caregivers, to have that that person who sees you and I think that’s a really important part of this is that 12.5 years, if you have any experience with kids at all, you know that 12.5 years, you can see ups and downs and you can be in and out. But those 12.5 years, the youth know that those mentors are there with them. And unfortunately, because some of those inequitable systems that we talked about, the youth in our program are used to systems letting them down or expecting them to fail and to know that the trust that the mentors have with them and that one on one powerful relationship is unconditional, is very powerful in the lives of the youth that we walk alongside.

Miller: Is that half year built in for a specific reason? It’s an unusually specific length of time. I mean the length of it is what’s most remarkable, but the half, in addition, I don’t totally understand it.

Rossi: Good question. Dave. So we do selection of the youth who will join our program in their kindergarten year. So we do the selection at the beginning of the kindergarten year and then we select those youth at the second part of their kindergarten year and that’s where you get that half.

Miller: Do you know at the beginning that this pair is going to stay together for that long? I mean it almost sounds like a kind of marriage and people can change, needs can change, dynamics can change. What happens if, for whatever, reason that that duo is not quite meshing?

Rossi: Oh that’s a good question, that no matter what part of it is interesting because we know that there will be ups and downs and because life happens, all of our mentors are not going to be with that specific youth for 12.5 years, there might be another mentor that steps in. We have a youth who most recently talked about a change like that and they, at first blush, when their mentor, who they had been with for several years was leaving the organization, they were very sad and they just thought this is not, this is it, I’m not going to get over this. And they were really bonded to that person and they then had a new mentor and was reflecting, they are a senior who’s getting ready to go to Portland State, so they were reflecting on this experience and talked about how they came around and started to trust their new mentor and I think a lot of that ability to trust is because while the one on one relationship is extremely powerful and transformative, there is a relationship with the organization, that there is an embedded trust in what we’re trying to do on their behalf. And so when this new mentor came as a part of this transition, unplanned transition, they built that trust and so now this particular youth has two mentors that they worked with that are in their corner, so it was actually, it turned out to be a wonderful thing.

Miller: Why have these be paid mentorships?

Rossi: Going back to that idea that there’s so many systems in the lives of the youth that we’re walking alongside, that failed them, or don’t stick with them or don’t believe in them. The reason that Friends of the Children was started by our amazing founder, Duncan Campbell, is that he wanted to know ‘what are some of the foundational principles that make mentoring successful?’ and the longevity is a really important piece of that. And so having that no matter what component and their longevity are just so critical.

Miller: And paying people enables that. It makes it a little bit easier for people to take time out of their busy lives to do this work?

Rossi: Absolutely. So if you think about it, as much as we love volunteers and we have volunteers in the organization, we’re all busy people. And so when we volunteer, it’s not necessarily our first priority and we’re not always able to do even the things we set out to do. But when you’re a paid professional mentor, receiving professional development and this is your, this is your profession, that’s when we can, we can look at that longevity, and have our mentors stay in the lives of the youth for this long period of time.

Miller: I should note that Friends of the Children chapters in central Oregon and in the Klamath Basin also received gifts directly from MacKenzie Scott in addition to your chapter and others around the country. What will you be able to do with this $8 million dollar grant?

Rossi: Yes. So we are thrilled to get this 7.7 million, but yes, almost…

Miller: Sorry, I rounded up.

Rossi: That’s okay. We are going to deepen the impact of what we’re able to do with the youth who are currently in our program. Going back to an example of really trying to lean into some of the mental health support that we can provide post-pandemic. We also really want to increase our footprint and so we’re thrilled to be able to reach out and serve more youth in the Portland metropolitan area, which is really important to all of us and we’re also going to be able to provide additional professional development for our mentors, for our friends who are here so that they can continue to grow in their profession. And of course it provides just a wonderful financial foundation for Friends Portland, so that we can really look at how we utilize these funds in the next 3-5 years, to go much deeper and do more work in this community, partnering with other organizations and also going more deeply into what we’re able to accomplish here at Friends of the Children, Portland.

Miller: This is the second or third time over the last couple of years that we’ve had a conversation with an Oregon nonprofit that got a big chunk of money from MacKenzie Scott, and the sense I got from an earlier conversation was it almost came out of the blue. Is this money that you applied for? Or did you just find out one day that you were going to get a big check?

Rossi: A little bit of a combination. The process, this is where we’re very, for a lot of reasons, grateful for the national network and so we have a national organization. And if you noticed though, even though we had a lot of Oregon chapters, who are recipients of MacKenzie Scott funds, many of them were part of a national network. So I believe that the origins of this gift started with that National, they were looking at the National Network and building that relationship. And then as a result, many of the chapters in our network were also recipients of these funds.

Miller: Well, Traci Rossi, thanks very much for joining us today.

Rossi: Thank you so much, Dave, we appreciate the invitation.

Miller: Traci Rossi is the executive director of the Portland Chapter of Friends of the Children.

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