Welcome to the Community Friends Website!

Community Friends became an official student organization in the Fall of 2002, but the program has been in existence since 1960. Nearly four thousand Middlebury students have been matched as mentors with children from Addison County. Right now we have about 75 pairs of Community Friends.

Pairs get together usually once a week for a few hours. Sometimes Middlebury students bring their friends onto campus to a hockey game or for dinner in the dining hall. Check out our Activity Ideas for some suggestions for ways to spend time with your Community Friend.

Becoming a mentor is a very important responsibility. A mentor is a guide, a trusted friend, a good listener, and a coach. Your role is to support your friend, and serve as a positive role model for him or her. You can't save the child you work with from every terrible thing that may have happened in his or her life, and you can't fix all of his or her problems. What you can do is help to demonstrate how you have been successful in your life, and hope they learn from your example.

If you do decide to get involved with Community Friends and become a mentor, please think carefully about what it will mean. Research on mentoring says that the positive relationship that develops helps kids make better choices about safe behaviors, drug use, alcohol use, smoking. The research also tells us that when a mentoring relationship dissolves after just a few weeks or months, it can be more damaging to the child than if there had been no mentor at all.

Most of the pairs we match up have wonderful relationships that last through the volunteer's years at Middlebury and beyond. For more information about mentoring, check out the Vermont Mentoring Partnership website.