For young people, most of their relationships with adults are top-down: parents, teachers, and coaches all set rules and expectations for young people and they are to follow them or face consequences.
That’s what makes the Lunch Buddies program at the Y Detroit Leadership Academy so special. In the program, which is put on by Big Brothers Big Sisters of Metropolitan Detroit, students at the school are matched with an adult volunteer at Quicken Loans. Once a week, the children are bused from their school downtown to Quicken, where they have lunch with their buddy in the employee cafeteria.
It’s a mutually beneficial relationship; the adults know they are connecting with and making a difference in their community, and the young people enjoy the attention from an adult who is just there to listen and be their friend, not give advice or discipline them. “This is not a parent, teacher or any authority figure; it’s a friend, a buddy,” says Dyrel Johnson, manager of site-based programs and partnerships for Big Brothers Big Sisters. “I think having that relationship, that listening ear, benefits them. To have one person who comes to you and says they want to talk to you and listen to you for an hour — even as adults we would all love that, to have someone to listen in the middle of our day. ”
For the Bigs, what makes it worthwhile is a chance to really feel connected to Detroit. In many cases they have come from all over to work at Quicken, and they want to be part of their “work home” city in a meaningful way.
“The continuous response we get from the Bigs is that volunteering with the Lunch Buddies program makes them feel connected to their community — they want to dive into what Detroit is and what it fees like to be a part of Detroit,” says Lynette Simmons, vice president of programming for Big brothers Big Sisters.
As professionals, the “Bigs” are role models for the young people, someone they can aspire to be like. Quicken’s facility is also very impressive, and can start young people thinking about what they need to do to have a similar career. To that end, the luncheons also include sessions on academic development and relationship building.
The Lunch Buddies program launched thanks to meetings between Dara Munson, president and CEO of Big Brothers Big Sisters of Metropolitan Detroit, and Reid Thebault, CEO of the YMCA of Metro Detroit. They were exploring ways to develop collaborative partnerships, and creating better outcomes for youth through mentoring was an obvious fit, Lynette Simmons says.
Kamia, a seventh grader at Y-DLA, is one of those youth. She very much enjoyed the program and her relationship with her Big, Whitney. “It felt really good,” she says. “I really liked it because my parents, they don’t understand me as well as Whitney did — she was really nice to me. It feels good to have a big buddy that you could talk to.”
She and Whitney have exchanged phone numbers and hope to stay in touch, she says. And she definitely plans to participate in the program next year.