Big Brothers Big Sisters of Alaska will no longer make new matches between youths and volunteers in four Alaska communities: Haines, Homer, Hoonah, and Sitka. The organization which matches volunteers and youth for one-on-one mentoring, says it’s a matter of reduced federal and state grant funding.
Rosalie Loewen opens a filing cabinet at the Big Brothers Big Sisters office in downtown Haines, filled with file folders for hundreds of mentors and youths they’ve served.
“Well, it’s packed in there so tight that I can’t actually fit any more in there,” said Loewen.
As she’s getting ready to close the office, she says she’s been reflecting on all the lives that have been touched by the program over its fifteen years in Haines.
“And I remember that it is not just the names that are in that filing cabinet but their siblings and their parents and all of the other kids in their classroom and just, it’s just a big piece of the way the fabric holds together for this community,” said Loewen.
Loewen is the Community Director for Big Brothers Big Sisters of Haines where for the past two years she has been responsible for all aspects of the program. The non-profit specializes in helping kids connect with adult mentors. Loewen says the program serves about ten percent of youth in the Haines School.
The change was announced Friday and goes into effect after May 31 [2018]. Big Brothers Big Sisters will close their offices in the four communities and consolidate them to Anchorage or Juneau where a dedicated staff specialist will focus on serving existing matches. Loewen says the closure is unfortunate.
“It’s a little frustrating to see the program close now because research is showing us more and more that kids who experience developmental trauma, one of the most important things that you do that will create more positive outcome in their lives and help them overcome that challenge, is to match them with an adult mentor with a stable, healthy, positive relationship,” said Loewen.
She says that relationship creates a buffer for the child and it can mean that a level of stress for a child is manageable rather than toxic. And that buffer is sometimes hard to find in rural communities. Divorce, death, incarceration, addiction—those are the big four reasons that a parent is unable to be involved with their kids and which create an opportunity for mentors to fill the gap. And even though serving rural kids through Big Brothers Big Sisters is expensive, like just about everything in rural Alaska, she says, it’s critical.
“It’s a mistake to close this program down because in the rural areas the kids don’t have other programs that can fill in. Sometimes it’s a geographical issue where the people who sit on the statewide board are located in Anchorage and it’s hard for them to get that perspective.”
In 2017, Big Brothers Big Sisters of Alaska served more than 580 youths across the state. The organization has an annual budget of 1.6 Million dollars and 20 employees.
Big Brothers Big Sisters currently serves 19 matches in Haines, 19 in Hoonah, 14 in Sitka and 26 in Homer. The organization will continue making new matches in Anchorage, Fairbanks, Juneau and the Mat-Su Valley.
Heather Harris, CEO for Big Brothers Big Sisters of Alaska, says the organization gets about half of its funding from federal and state grant monies, which are disappearing.
“We’re in a difficult financial place and we have to make incredibly difficult decisions. And this is not a decision that was made lightly by any means,” said Harris. “These communities and the youth that are in them are incredibly important to us and to the organization as a whole and we know we’ve done life-saving work in those communities.”
Big Brothers Big Sisters has been working in Alaska since 1972. Harris says she’s hopeful the organization will eventually be able to reopen their offices in the communities.
Although she’s heartbroken about the Haines office closing, Loewen is also realistic, saying the days of big grants and free-flowing funds to solve the state’s social problems are over.
“Things will have to be homegrown, come up from the bottom. But I feel not entirely pessimistic about that because, in my mind, that’s what Alaskan’s are really good at, pulling themselves up by the bootstraps and being independent and making things work,” said Loewen. “We’ve gotten used to a lot of top-down economics and now it’s time for a little bit of bottom-up work.”
Staff in the four communities have been given the opportunity to continue on a part-time basis. Loewen will not be one of them. Loewen says she has one more young person on the waiting list for a mentor match and she plans on making that connection before she closes the Big Brothers Big Sisters office door in Haines one last time [April. 13].
