Last Day

Today is my last day at Big Brothers Big Sisters.  This has been a really emotional week for me. I'll write soon about my upcoming plans, but for now it feels like I am stepping into the abyss.  It's hard to leave a movement you've worked in for 12 years to which you've given so much of your mental and emotional life.

Here are a few pics from my tenure at Big Brothers Big Sisters.  Below I have pasted an email I sent to colleagues yesterday.

my first day at BBBS, with Natalie, Jenny, and Amber
November 1, 2001

selling gumbo to help BBBS in New Orleans after Katrina,
with Karen and Valorie

Tisha, a longtime mentor to me at the National office,
here with Ferguson in Seattle recently

my awesome team at BBBSA, Kristin, Salem, Sandra and Carly

***

The week I started at Big Brothers Big Sisters of Juneau, my sister gave me a little box that said "A Little Box of Courage" on it.  It was November, 2001, and I was walking into my first job as a manager into a business I didn't know.  I had been a grassroots organizer for a conservation group.  What did I know about running a social service non-profit for youth?  I walked into the office with Natalie, Amber and Jenny (with Scott running a remote office) and was scared. I was clearly in over my head.

Luckily, I was able to learn from my staff and my predecessor, Tony, and many, many of you at the National office and beyond.  And I had that little box of courage that I would peek at every now and then.

Please accept my sincere thanks for all that you've taught me and shared with me over the last 12 years.  I am who I am for having known and worked with all of you.

I'm sorry, but tomorrow (August 1) is my last day, and this is my swan song, so I am going to list a few of the highlights of my career with Big Brothers Big Sisters and give some parting words.  You can scroll down to the bottom and skip all this to get to my contact information:

With seed money from an earmark from Senator Ted Stevens, we opened offices in Hoonah (Tlingit village of 1000 residents) and Ketchikan in 2002.  These offices are still open and staffed by two of my first hires, Sally and Gretchen, and still serving kids in a meaningful way.

I first got a taste of data and fun with Excel formulas when I helped Mark Taylor develop the original Metrics Workbook.

My mom and sister were able to be with me in Indianapolis in 2006 when I won an award at the BBBSA National Conference. I cried like a baby on stage in front of hundreds.  Hopefully the videotapes have all been destroyed.

We tried to adapt the Amachi model of mentoring children of prisoners in Alaska. It was a great honor to host a visit to Juneau by Rev. Dr. Wilson Goode.  I'll also never forget my first visit to prison to recruit Littles for the program. I met a woman there who had just lost visitation rights for her 6-month old baby.  While we never perfected the model, we served a lot of children of prisoners, and I will always have a place in my heart for these children.

Through Betsy's fine work, we executed a MOA between the US Coast Guard and the Juneau School District and agreed to support the local USCG Partnership in Education program through our Bigs in Schools program in 2007. The partnership continues to generate numbers of quality volunteers for the local program.

I worked with many fine staff as Executive Director, which culminated when my management team was so strong that they organized meetings without me.

Somehow, my peers elected me to the Nationwide Leadership Council, where I first got a taste for helping children across the US.  I was energized by thinking about helping youth across our entire country, in places I knew could really use our programs. When Judy Vredenburgh asked me to be part of a strategic planning committee, I was thrilled.  Working with Bridgespan and members of the national board and staff was incredible. I am now a total believer in data-driven strategic planning.

After many years of hoping and planning, we executed a merger and created BBBS of Alaska in 2007.  We made our share of mistakes, but the organization that Peggy, Taber, Annette and I helped create is still serving youth in many communities across the state, even through some severe fiscal challenges.  I wish the organization had been able to retain all of the talented staff that it started with and I still grieve for all of those that were lost.  Despite our missteps, I look back at the job of VP of Programs as the best job I’ve held during my 12 years of BBBS service.

Thanks to the encouragement of Tisha, I attended the most impactful week of professional development of my career when I attended the Summer Institute of Youth Mentoring.  I never knew there was all this research about youth mentoring.  I met Tom Keller, Tim Cavell, Michael Karcher, Renee Spencer and Carla Herrera and got to ask a million questions about how and why mentoring works.  I encountered the research bug and it bit me.

Through Tom's help, I was awarded a Distinguished Fellowship from the WT Grant Foundation. I got to spend an amazing six months at Portland State University and took PhD classes in Social Work.  I also got to know David DuBois through the Fellowship and began a collaboration with him and Tom that continues to this day.  I was able to help complete a meta-analysis of school-based mentoring RCTs and they even let me be first author of an article that we wrote that got published in a pre-eminent publication (and it only took us 100 drafts to finalize).

In my tenure at BBBS, I had two long-standing aspirations.  One was to be CEO of BBBS of Alaska.  When that job opened up, I applied for it and didn't get it.  The board wisely chose Taber, who has shepherded the organization through some tough times.  The other was to be VP of Programs for BBBS of America.  That job doesn't really exist anymore, but at least I got to work for the national office, starting in 2011.

While these last two years haven't always been easy, it's been an honor to work with some of the finest staff that I've ever worked with, helping youth across this great country.  I've worked on an amazing team with Sandra, Kristin, Salem and Carly and have been part of some thrilling work, including helping develop and test two new community-based models of mentoring, helping author the national report on youth outcomes with infographics, and helping create a tool for agencies to use to create their own infographics with their own outcome data.

I'll never forget when Lisa, then a Match Support Specialist, asked me why we raise money by talking about some of the life-changing matches we create, when the average BBBS match doesn't really look like that.  With Lisa's inspiration and all that I've learned about research, it's been my passion over the last few years to help more of our matches look like the ones we talk about in fundraising and increase the quality of our average match.  I am encouraged that so many of you share that same passion.

If had a magic wand to increase the impact of our programs, I would invest deeply in staff development at our very front lines.  I strongly believe that the quality of our programs and the depth of our impact are directly related to the strength of our Match Support staff.  We need to develop these key staff, pay them well, and encourage them to stick around.  Every office needs a senior Match Support Specialist with a depth of life and BBBS experience to advise the younger and less experienced staff.  I would also encourage a deep investment in parental engagement.  We need a culture shift within BBBS to start thinking about our parents as key partners whose support is crucial for the development of our matches and our Littles.  Too often we discount our parents and view them as obstacles, rather than supports.  Finally, I would invest deeply in our internal evaluation.  We have a wealth of data that can be used to study our matches and improve the outcomes we produce in kids’ lives.  Investment is needed to mine this data and learn from it.  Without such an investment, our large sources of data are an untapped resource.

For those of you continuing in this work, please take care of each other.  We help youth to build relationships with adults, but we can only do it through authentic, caring relationships with each other.  You will also each find your own little box of courage.  It's right there inside you.

Keep in touch,

Marc