Wednesday, January 14, 2009

BHM Snowboard Season

Tonight Jarett and I attended the BHM info session for their upcoming snowboard season. As mentioned in my 2008 recap blog, this past summer I volunteered my time on Sunday's teaching inner city kids how to surf. And this winter, we'll be taking them snowboarding.

After attending tonight's info session, I'm more pumped than ever on this program. Basically we spend an entire weekend with these kids. We pick them up on Friday evening, and each volunteer is assigned 2-3 teens. They are your group for the whole weekend. You drive to the mountain together, teach them how to snowboard, and participate in activities together. I love the surfing program, but one thing I felt was missing was a deep connection with the kids. Every time I taught, I had a different kid. Hard to build a relationship when you only spend a few hours with a kid and then move onto the next. I can already tell this is going to be a really amazing experience.

One thing that was interesting tonight was how the president of the mentoring group was telling us how most people don't want to work with teens. They want to work with the younger kids, the ones that are still impressionable and think they need to listen to you when you tell them to do something. But teens are at the point where they realize they DON'T have to listen to you, and they cause trouble. Serious, life threatening trouble. And that is scary so people shy away from that. But teens are really the ones who need the mentoring the most, and they also benefit deeply from it. This is why the program targets teens 14-18 years old.

The program will be two weekends this winter. If anyone is interested in learning more, let me know and I'm happy to pass along more info.

1 comment:

keith + andrea said...

It would be really cool to get involved with something like BHM out here. I guess it would be hard since the ocean is a bit of a drive and so is the mountains. If you know of anything...let me know.