Mentoring program Baloo and You
Fostering educational opportunities through mentoring: university students support primary school kids
Ongoing project - open for funding
The project is open to funding. Help us to positively influence the educational pathways of primary school children with educational disadvantages through individual support. Developing their potential and creating more equal opportunities makes our society stronger.
This is what it's all about
Students volunteer to engage in mentoring a primary school child for a year, thereby increasing their chances for an adequate education and social participation. The students (called ‘Baloos’) support the children (‘Moglis’) outside of school by devoting a few hours of their time and attention to them once a week – for discussions, games, sporting or cultural activities, excursions into nature and much more. These joint activities enable an informal learning process, allowing both the children and students to acquire a wealth of knowledge and experience, which is important for their education and personal development. The positive effects of the program are confirmed by the accompanying scientific research.
What we want to achieve
Even though equal opportunities and equal access to education are considered important values in our society, access to education is still dependent on social conditions. Mentoring has proven to be a successful approach to overcome social inequalities and to strengthen children’s potentials and foster students’ social engagement. Baloo and You intervenes before facing the first educational threshold, entering the secondary school. The mentoring program has the potential to enable social mobility and to positively influence the paths through education and life in general, especially for children growing up with low socio-economic conditions. The program creates a win-win-situation, as also the students benefit from their engagement. Students receive professional consulting and guidance in an accompanying seminar and through an online-diary and obtain insights into psycho-social topics. They strengthen important key competencies for their future professional life and leading positions, such as a sense for responsibility, communication and conflict management skills, empathy, durability or intercultural competence. Students thrive through their mentoring relationship with the child, through insights into a different social reality and through witnessing the child’s development.
The program is targeted at primary school children, who can be registered for different reasons and who might benefit from the mentoring through a university student. Reasons for registering a child can be the support in social or linguistic integration or support during a difficult phase in life, strengthening of a child’s self-confidence, personal potentials and access to educational opportunities or the widening of a child’s horizon. Mentoring offers the opportunity to compensate the lack of informal learning processes at home and to create learning situations with positive emotional connotations, to manifest behavioral patterns and to create moments of success.
The large amount of scientific research proves the positive impact on the children during and after the participation in the mentoring. Studies show, for example, improvements in children’s pro-social behavior, ability to concentrate, a child’s motivation and honesty or a child’s self-assessment. After participation in Baloo and You over one year, the probability of a child from a low socio-economic status entering the higher secondary education (Gymnasium) increases by 20%. Thus, the gap between families with high and low socio-economic status gets almost halfway closed. The results of the scientific studies are underlined by experiences with the children. Teachers and parents report about the kids becoming more open and self-confident within the year of the mentoring, about an improvement in their communication skills or about an improvement in their performance in school or in their basic competencies. The children experience the joy of learning and living, reliability and hope. One of the kids said: “Thursday is my favorite day in the week because I can spend time with my Baloo.”
With its accompanying seminar, the mentoring program is integrated in the interdisciplinary teaching offer at FORUM; it is therefore accessible for all students at KIT. Thus, the students can combine their weekly voluntary engagement with the kids with their study performance. Credit points can be achieved by writing an online diary about their experiences with the child, by regularly participating in the accompanying seminar and by submitting a reflection report after 6 months and at the end of the mentoring year. Through the exchange in the accompanying seminar, students reflect on their experiences and receive further training for their task through insights into psychosocial, pedagogic and communication theories and by receiving supervision through the seminar lecturer. The students’ main benefit from participating in the mentoring program is the gain in social competencies and self-organization, as well as the strengthening of their personality. Experience shows that at the end of the program, the students themselves report on the large gain in competencies and the widening of their horizon through the inherent change of perspectives brought along by the mentoring program. Alongside the professional knowledge acquired in their studies at KIT, these experiences make an important contribution to their professional fundament as future performers in our society. The transfer of learning processes into studies, profession, daily life and social life is guaranteed. A student reports “I entered the program with the assumption of changing my Mogli’s life – but it also changed my own life.”
Every individual should be supported and fostered according to his or her potentials and every unrecognized potential means a loss for society. A SROI-study on Baloo and You shows that mentoring even has an economic impact on society: the social return moves between 4 - 8 Euros per invested Euro, which proves the efficiency of mentoring.
When facing the goal of enabling access to KIT for more students from low economic backgrounds and attracting more female students to MINT-subjects, investing in education and life situations of children is a sustainable approach. The intervention of the mentoring into a child’s life is actually minor, however it can have a major, long-lasting positive impact on the child’s life and education.
With the impacts of the program, Baloo and You corresponds to seven of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals of the United Nations, which form the key indicators until 2030 to reach a socially, economically and ecologically sustainable development. One of the UN-goals is the reduction of inequality of opportunities. Furthermore, the mentoring program contributes to more democracy in society.
- Personnel expenses for the project coordination, the accompanying seminar and the individual consulting of the students/the mentoring couples
- Trainings for the students with external experts (e.g. first aid on children, prevention and child protection, nonviolent communication)
- Pocket money for the mentoring couples (Baloos and Moglis) to support their activities
- Joined activities and celebrations with all participants from one mentoring year
- Public Relations
Facts and figures
Every summer term a new mentoring year starts
Funding required:
€ 48,000 per year (personnel and material costs)
Existing funding partnerships:
open for funding
Project responsibility KIT:
Cooperation with the nation-wide association Balu und Du e.V. Project coordination at KIT: M.A. Ina Scholl, General Studies. Forum Science and Society (FORUM)
"I can say with complete conviction that the sponsorship of my Mogli means a great deal to me and has enriched my last year with a very special experience. It was incredibly beautiful and felt great to make a little boy's day special through a meeting, to be able to give him my full attention and provide him with valuable inspiration for his life."
Leander Kolb
- former Baloo at KIT -
"I am fascinated by the effectiveness of the simple formula ‘1 child + 1 mentor, 1-2 hours per week for 1 year’: we can create new life perspectives for both sides and we enable learning situations with positive emotional connotation. Every year, it is a joy to see both students and children thrive through the experiences of the mentoring and how the time spent together opens new doors and has a lasting impact in the participants’ future."
Ina Scholl
- project coordination at KIT -
