About Community Friends

What makes Community Friends a great mentoring program?

  • Professional support and resources. As part of HowardCenter’s Child, Youth and Family Services, Community Friends Mentoring has the resources and expertise to provide quality mentoring relationships for children and youth with stresses in their lives. Mentoring pairs are supported with professional supervision and, if need be, in-house clinical support. Our goal is to create quality friendships that work for children, volunteers, and families.

  • Serving all of Chittenden County. Community Friends Mentoring is the only mentoring program that serves all of Chittenden County from Burlington’s Old North End to the hills of Huntington.

  • Experience. Community Friends Mentoring has been supporting area children since 1982. In the past three decades, we have successfully forged positive relationships for hundreds of youth in the Champlain Valley. Among our mentee alumnae are chefs, poets, military officers and teachers.

  • Long term relationships. Community Friends Mentoring requires both mentors and mentees to agree to a minimum of 12 months of outings in order to build long term relationships. We are proud that many of our matches enjoy their time together so much that they stay connected to the program for years. Some even choose to become CFM Alumni after they have left the program.

  • Success. When surveyed, our mentees show an increased trust, a more hopeful sense of the future, and healthier life choices. See the results of our 2011 mentor survey here.

Program Staff

Kristen Hayden-West, program coordinator,CVA, MATESL, has been the Community Friends Mentoring Coordinator for 16 years and a mentor for 25 years. During that time she has crafted and supported hundreds of mentoring matches for children and volunteers across Chittenden County. When not at HowardCenter meeting with prospective mentors, organizing match activities and writing grants, Kristen can be found hanging out with her husband, cooking ethnic dinners, visiting thrift shops and working on her Master in Public Administration at UVM.

 

 

Kayla Schutte, AmeriCorps VISTA. Community Friends has been lucky to receive an AmeriCorps VISTA since 2003. Kayla just recently earned her degree in Environmental Studies at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, and will be serving with CFM for the 2011-2012 year. During her service she hopes to implement a new contact and data management database for the program, improve resources for mentors by creating an easy-to-access calendar of events and simplified social media approach as well as become a CFM mentor herself.
 

 

Program History

Community Friends Mentoring began as an offshoot of Children’s Outpatient Services, and has grown and evolved with its parent agency, HowardCenter.

  • 1982: In September, Mary Carol Massonneau formed the program known as Special Friends. Lynn Gardener helped coordinate the program which recruited, trained and matched the first HowardCenter mentors.
  • 1990: The Baird Center for Children and Families, a separate agency, started their own mentoring program, Baird Friends.
  • 1994: HowardCenter merged with the Baird Center for Children and Families. Existing Special Friends and Baird Friends matches continued with limited support for matches.
  • 1996: The Baird Center division of the Howard Center for Human Services receives grant funding to re-invigorate the Agency’s youth mentoring program, renamed “Community Friends.”
  • 2006: Community Friends reached its goal of supporting 100 active matches.
  • 2012: Community Friends Mentoring celebrates three decades of mentoring at the HowardCenter.