Big Brothers Big Sisters of Idaho with Executive Director Hillary Xoumanivong

So Hillary, how do you measure success for the organization?

It's a great question.

You know, we make matches that often last for one year, sometimes last for 10 years, and impact across the board is sometimes hard to measure immediately because, you know, the impact their mentor has can really take flight when they're 20.

But we have a really robust way of measuring current success at the moment.

So all of our participants have surveys, annual surveys that they're conducting.

We do baseline surveys when they first enter the program and then every year after that.

We're checking the strength of relationship with their big.

We're checking in on their grades, their risky behaviors, and sense of belonging, self-confidence, all the things across the board.

We really want to measure the efficacy of our program.

We use these results to guide our future programming efforts and where we're doing, how we're supporting, all of those things.

But then on a bigger level, we're really tracking how many youth are we serving every year? Are we growing our network of support? Are we reaching kids who need us the most? And then, yeah, are we just reaching kids who need us the most? And are we following kind of the same footsteps as our sister agencies across the nation? And so far, we're doing really well.

The Big Brothers Big Sisters Federation puts forth... criteria every single year for in order to be recognized as one of the leading agencies.

And I'm really proud to say that Big Brothers Big Sisters of Idaho has received one of those national awards 10 out of the last 11 years.

So this is a legacy of stellar programming that lasts far beyond even my leadership.

And we're just really proud to continue that legacy and continue serving our community to the best that we can.