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Boston Globe
College students founded HomeBuddies to mentor kids during the pandemic
By Lauren Daley
August 5, 2020
Rising Boston University sophomore Rachel Harris and her elementary
school mentee connected via Zoom recently to work on their
science-fiction story.
“We only have the first two chapters done,” the theater arts major says
with a laugh, revealing a bit of the story line, which takes place 100
years in the future
Harris, who lives in Colorado, and her mentee, who lives in New York,
have also baked vanilla cupcakes and made friendship bracelets through
the online mentoring program HomeBuddies.
Cofounded by a group of six college students from Vermont’s Middlebury
College and one from Columbia University shortly after the pandemic
started, HomeBuddies facilitates virtual group and one-on-one
mentorship relationships between college students and kids in grades
K-7.
In this new socially-distanced world without playdates, sports games,
classroom connections, or birthday parties, their goal is simply to be
friendly older-sibling figures kids can connect with, learn from, talk
to, or create with, a few times a week.
“It really began when we were all sent home from our schools — we were
all alone in our houses watching the news every night and trying to
figure out how we could help,” said HomeBuddies cofounder Katie Koch,
19, of Hadley.
“We wanted to use our strengths and passions and experiences to help.
We all care a lot about kids. ... HomeBuddies was the idea we had to
help families and the kids whose worlds were being turned upside down,”
said Koch, a rising junior at Middlebury majoring in psychology and
minoring in education. She also works part-time at a Vermont preschool
while in school.
The “common thread” among the cofounders — Koch, Una Darrell, Paulina
De Seve, Katie Beadle, Ernest Robertson, Cecilia Needham, and Valentina
Hogenhuis — was they were all “involved with mentorships in one way or
another,” Koch says.
Koch, for example, volunteers in a Middlebury mentoring program, and
also loved mentoring through Big Brothers Big Sisters when she was a
student at Deerfield Academy.
In addition to one-on-one sessions, HomeBuddies, which launched in
June, offers group activities: arts and crafts, storytelling, yoga,
science experiments.
Koch said they’ve folded origami, made paper-snake chains, “dinosaur
handprints,” and cloud dough (“like a lighter Play-Doh”), friendship
bracelets, unicorn wind socks, straw rockets.
In science, they’ve concocted “oobleck” (the slime from Dr. Seuss’s
“Bartholomew and the Oobleck”), learned how clouds make rain and about
dinosaur fossils, asked why sharks float, built tinfoil boats and
tested how many pennies they could hold. Once, Koch gathered sea
critters to take kids on “a virtual field-trip.”
On Wednesdays, it’s yoga with Hogenhuis, who leads kids through
belly-breathing, sun salutations, guided shavasana meditations, and
mindfulness practices.
Meanwhile, one-on-one sessions are more tailored to the individual
child’s interests, says Koch. Parents have different reasons for
signing up: “Often they say, ‘I want my child to spend less time alone
in the house,’ or ‘I want him to use his voice more in conversation.’ ”
Operating on a pay-what-you-can model, the mentees live around the US,
from Vermont to Texas, Koch says. Because the cofounders plan to keep
HomeBuddies operating at least through the end of the pandemic or
beyond, Koch says they’re aiming to become an official 501c3 nonprofit.
When summer vacation ends, HomeBuddies plans to transition their group
sessions from a summer camp vibe to a model that functions “more like
an after-school activity,” she says. “Many parents have shown an
interest in having their child have a set thing to do after school as a
kind of replacement for the sports and playdates that won’t be able to
happen.”
Via social media and word-of-mouth, the group has recruited college
students as volunteers, bringing their field of 19- to 22-year-old
mentors up to 25, hailing from Rhode Island to California.
BU’s Rachel Harris, for example, discovered HomeBuddies via Facebook and applied in June.
For both mentor and mentee, Harris says, “It’s nice to have a scheduled
thing in your day, to talk to someone outside your house, to work on
something. I love it.”
As do the kids, says Koch:
“You can sense it in a session — when a kid logs on and smiles, and is
so excited to see you. … There’s a bond that forms. That older-sibling
relationship is something we strive for, in terms of building that
trust and knowledge of one another.”
Koch just loves knowing HomeBuddies might be “making some kind of
difference in these kids’ lives at a time that I imagine can be
difficult and lonely. It’s a connection in a time when connections can
be hard to come by.”
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