Color-coded dots are pasted across the maps that cover the walls in the conference room. Small yellow dots mark the locations of woman volunteers while green dots represent men.
I couldn’t help but notice that yellow dots are everywhere, scattered across the maps like buckshot. But green dots – like good men – are darned hard to find.
“It’s that old fear of commitment,” said Dave DeForest-Stalls, president of Big Brothers Big Sisters of Colorado.
He wasn’t joking.
Twice a month, BBBS conducts training sessions for new volunteer “Bigs,” adults who are willing to mentor a child. At each of these meetings, the staff encounters the same phenomenon: lots of woman volunteers and only an occasional man.
So the boys who need big brothers remain on waiting lists, sometimes for months or even years.
“Right now, we have 132 adults in the process,” said Ann Kusic, vice president of BBBS. “Three-quarters of them are women.”
And the need for male volunteers in the metro area keeps growing.
“We could use another 50 men right now,” she said.
A priority for the organization is the REACH (Relationships Expanding a Child’s Horizons) program, which matches mentors with children who have a parent or guardian in prison.
Rusan McNeal, a BBBS recruiter, said her father was incarcerated for most of her childhood, so she knows what it’s like.
“The kids just need a caring adult,” she said. “The age or the ethnicity of the volunteers really mean very little.”
But even after she gives her recruitment pitch, saying that all it takes is two to four sessions a month between mentor and child and a commitment of one year, she still has trouble persuading men to volunteer.
“What I hear most often from the men is ‘I’m very busy,”‘ she said.
As if women aren’t.
Bill Roadway of Lakewood, a volunteer for 19 years, was busy too.
In addition to a job and other responsibilities, Roadway found the time to mentor five boys over the years.
“We did mostly fun activities – bowling, tennis, archery,” he said. “I used to use a lot of firewood, and one boy helped me gather wood. Another time, one little brother helped me put insulation in the house. It was kind of a dirty job. I don’t think he enjoyed it, but we did it together.”
Since the most meaningful conversations between adults and children often take place during everyday activities, BBBS discourages mentors from becoming Disneyland dads or moms to the children.
“We tell volunteers to just live their lives and take the kids along,” DeForest-Stalls said.
Kusic said they try to ensure the success of the relationship by considering interests, personalities and geographic convenience when making matches between mentors and kids, and all volunteers are carefully screened.
“Two or three weeks ago, we had one of those perfect, unscripted moments after a match meeting,” she said.
The mentor and the child walked out together, “and the child said, ‘I just want to be an architect someday,’ something he had never told us,” Kusic said. “The Big said, ‘Wow, I’m an architect.”‘
It almost brought tears to her eyes.
One way the organization is trying to address the shortage of male volunteers is by recruiting couples. When women volunteer, the recruiters ask if maybe their husbands would be willing to come along as part of a team.
“It’s one way for us to get some of the boys off the waiting list,” said McNeal, “and it’s good for the kids to see a couple in a healthy relationship.”
Being a “Big” was no big deal, Roadway said, not a burden, not a drag on his life.
“I’m a shy person, and they were all pretty shy,” he said. “I just felt like I was helping the boys feel better about themselves just by being there.
“I was helping them learn what it meant to be a man.”
Diane Carman’s column appears Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday. She can be reached at 303-820-1489 or dcarman@denverpost.com.
