Compassionate Action

Great Oaks Village Mentoring Program
Orange County Youth and Family Services Division

www.orangecountyfl.net/cms/DEPT/hfs/yfs/gov.htm

Great Oaks Village is a residential foster care group home for children birth to 17, who have been removed from their homes due to abuse, neglect or abandonment. The facility is comprised of seven 12-bed cottages, where children live with their peers and staff.

The Mentoring Program teams members of the community with individual children so that these young folks will have compassionate people in their lives, individuals who are not part of the institutional setting. A mentor becomes the “good adult friend” a child may never have had and/or the temporary, but the deeply caring and non-judgmental, surrogate parent he or she so desperately needs.

Mentors spend a lot of time just talking to the children, reading to them, and helping them with their homework, but they also take them out into the world to just plain have fun. There are limitless ways for caring adults to connect with these young people and the rewards in doing so are limitless as well.

Can this mentoring be challenging at times? Sure. These children have endured very difficult circumstances in their lives and their behavior demonstrates the deep suffering within that so badly needs a firm but loving touch. What an opportunity for the mentor to address the Four Noble Truths and deepen his or her spiritual practice.

For information about becoming a mentor, a reading buddy, or to help a kid with his or her homework, call:

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