The need to match young boys with positive male role models is great.  As a result, Michigan mentoring programs that completed the Wave V Census last fall are eligible to win $2,000 during a three-month male recruitment challenge being held by Mentor Michigan. 

During her 2008 State-of-the-State address Governor Jennifer Granholm set a goal of recruiting 10,000 new mentors by the year 2010.  Currently there are over 18,000 active mentors in Michigan with nearly 3,500 children on waiting lists to be matched with a mentor. 

The Mentor Michigan Male Recruitment Challenge will run from August 1 to October 31.  There are five categories and opportunities for mentoring programs to win.  The categories are:

• Highest percentage increase of male mentors
• Highest raw number increase of male mentors
• Organization that best uses mentors as recruiters
• Organization with best board member engagement
• Programs that are participating in the Men in Mentoring Pilot will be considered in their own category.  Programs that are participating in the Men in Mentoring Pilot through the Ottawa/Muskegon County Collaborative or the Metro Detroit Mentoring Collaboration will also be counted in this category.

Interested mentoring programs must register for the recruitment challenge by 5:00 p.m. Friday, July 25, by fax or mail.  For registration materials or to become a mentor, visit www.mentormichigan.org.

Wave V Census Data Revised

After the results of the Wave V Mentor Michigan Census (MMC) were released, Mentor Michigan learned one of the 136 programs that responded to the MMC inadvertently made an error in reporting their data.  Mentor Michigan asked Kahle Research Solutions to recalculate the MMC results.  In doing so Mentor Michigan was able to add four mentoring organization's information that reported following the initial MMC deadline.

Through these revised reports there are a few noteworthy changes including the number of youth served and the number of active mentors.

The original Wave V report released last November found 28,393 youth were being served by mentors.  The revised Wave V report released in April 2008 found 25,883 youth are being served.  November's report highlighted 20,603 active mentors in Michigan; April's revised report shows 18,232 mentors in the state.  This is

still the largest number of mentors ever counted in Michigan.  It compares to 16,382 mentors counted during the Wave IV Census, counting an increase of 1,850 new active mentors.  As there are organizations that did not report, it is still reasonable to estimate that there are more than 35,000 mentoring relationships in the state of Michigan in 2007.

All of the revised Wave V Census reports are available online at www.mentormichigan.org