My name is Mark Mintzer youth mentoring partnership. I’m the CEO and founder. We have been in operation programmatically since 2000 and have experienced some exciting growth. Really, there’s a lot of issues, as we know out there, especially kids living in generational poverty. There’s educational gaps, there’s food and financial insecurities, drugs, alcohol, teenage pregnancy. A lot of these things can be really traced back to a mentoring gap. One in three kids in this country will grow up without one consistent, positive adult in their life. That that’s a crazy statistic. We exist to close the mentoring gap. So many of our kids, especially those living in you know, generational poverty, don’t have a positive adult. So many ills of society can be taken care of by just having one positive adult, and that’s what we do, and these kids are worth it. So we use Fitness and Sports as our connector. Movement helps in so many different ways. So that’s the way we connect with kids, but we do it in many different ways. We insert trauma, informed, professionally trained mentors, many who are from the communities we serve, into physical education classes. We have our 3g curriculum that we’ve talked about, which is really goal setting and planning skills, the development of grit and resilience and the practice of gratitude, all three of those things are evidence based ways to connect, to develop and to be successful in life. It’s not really if we do. We care if you can throw a lacrosse ball, quite frankly, or shoot a basketball, but we’re providing safe havens for many of our kids. You know, coaches are more influential academically than teachers in the teen years and behaviorally than parents, so our mission hasn’t changed. It’s really our messaging around how we affect those barriers, think, you know, and then we’re like, geez, we really, as we grow this, we, you know, need some type of platform to organize. This is how we landed on DonorPerfect, because we also did the, you know, looked at seven different ones. We can’t figure out the language, who’s doing what, how, so I understand that can be a very overwhelming process. We jump on DonorPerfect, right? And we started doing a few things, I think, well, you know, we started entering everybody’s names, making sure it profiles that that type of thing. But we were definitely able to use some things with Constant Contact, so it helped us with our messaging. That that was a big plus for us. No doubt. It was also a great check and balance with QuickBooks, we have a forum online. It wasn’t the greatest of forums, with the help of the DonorPerfect staff, and I mean, maybe a 45 minute tutorial and then half an hour investment of our time, it’s a forum I’m really proud of. I feel like we can put this out in front of our high level donors and look like a professional organization. Really Are. The majority of our cost is for program staff, is to is to be able to put these angels, if you will, out out on the front lines. We get so much. I just, you know, I the stories I hear, the interactions I get to see. I’m the luckiest guy now.
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