Johnson City's Boys to Men youth program has taken its mentoring mission to the streets. Executive director Mike Marion, his staff and volunteers are walking 1000 miles in 100 days to raise awareness of the positive impact adult mentors make in the lives of at-risk children, to launch an innovative professional mentoring program to serve 500 local children and to encourage as many people as possible to visit and learn more at the campaign website www.thementoringman.org. The website features a detailed model for a new "Impacting Kids for Life" initiative, a long-term, professional mentoring program through which Boys to Men hopes to employ professional mentors to establish long-term mentoring relationship with children, beginning in first grade and continuing through high school. Professional mentors will be paid to provide all of their work hours to a set number of children and over the course of 12 years, will invest almost 9,000 hours of guidance to each child they are matched with, a significant increase from volunteer mentors. With this saturated life-skills training, kids can't help being a success.

Boy's to Men is a YPN ministry partner in Johnson City, TN and Mike has attended and hosted our Executive Director Leadership Training as well as participated in our one-on-one coaching program.

Keep up the great work Mike! The YPN network will keep you in our prayers.

Update from the Mentoring Man:

With a crowd of children cheering him on, Boys to Men founder and director, Michael Marion, finished his Mentoring Man campaign on October 31st. Michael walked 1000 miles over 100 days to raise awareness of the need for mentors and the new "Impacting Kids for Life" campaign. During these 100 days, more than 50 adults came forward to become mentors. And investment capital is being raised to hire full time professional mentors as part of this campaign. At the end of his walk, Michael presented one of their mentors, Jan Kincaid, with the Christian Association of Youth Mentors national mentor of the year award.