FAIRMONT — Kinship of Martin County, like so many other programs, is getting up to speed again after the COVID-19 pandemic. However, it would be fair to say that it never really slowed down but simply shifted gears. Associate Directors Katy Gonzalez and Sarah Caballero were able to share a detailed update on the program with Martin County Commissioners at their most recent meeting.

“We’ve matched another kid outside of Fairmont in Ceylon, which is a little bit difficult to do sometimes,” Gonzalez said. “We’ve said goodbye to three graduates this year, but our match numbers are remaining steady.” Gonzalez also said that the organization has been able to match at least seven new matches between mentors and mentees, with an eight occurring soon.

“31 percent of our mentees are outside of Fairmont, so we’re very close to the 32 percent range that you [the commission] had requested of us. Right now we have 49 matches. Last year at this time we had 48 matches with seven that had to exit, but due to COVID we actually had to wait a little bit to get to the point where we could exit them from the program.

“So we’ve been able to maintain that level and we’ll be at 50 this Friday [today], which we haven’t seen since before COVID.

“The second thing we’re very excited about is that this is the first time in Kinship history that we’ve had mentees back in the community, unfortunately just for the summer, who have been mentoring. So they’ve been part of a summer mentoring program. It’s very exciting to have the first mentees become mentors in Kinship history this year.”

Caballero shared that the program has also seen recent success with both events and community engagement.

“In the past several months we’ve had open hours on Thursdays from 4 p.m. to 7 p.m. and they’re very well attended,” she said. “A lot of our mentors and mentees are very excited to have something to do that’s not outside that they can have pre-planned, whether it’s a craft or an activity. We’ve had a lot of positive feedback from that.

“We recently went to the Fly-In breakfast at the airport and we had new mentees that got to ride on a plane that have never been on a plane before, so that was really exciting. We had over 900 served at the breakfast, and we had about 20 volunteers from Kinship show up, so it was a well-attended and well-received event and we were really happy to participate in that with the Lions Club.

“We’ve also been speaking throughout Martin County, we’ve been over to Truman and Northrop at their city hall meetings and we’ve been able to present Kinship and find opportunities to be out in the community and connect with the community as Kinship and help get the word out for some more support as far as mentoring is concerned. We will be out at the Fair booth this year, we’re working on a program with some information about the mentoring effect. We’re going to be doing interviews at the Martin County Fairgrounds for a presentation that we’re providing at the Red Rock Center.”

“Over this past year, we’ve been working on our manual and getting things together as far as training and reorganizing our structure and the paper part of Kinship. We’re really excited about that and being able to provide a better process for our mentors and mentees coming into the program.”

Gonzalez shared with commissioners that the staff is pleased with how the program has been able to maintain and endure.

“So we’re requesting funding at the current level with no increases or anything like that,” she said. “We’ve been holding steady, we’ve got that good support going and we’ve been able to maintain a quality program for our mentors and mentees, even during COVID.

“We never officially stopped. When everything shut down we moved to penpals and did virtual mentoring. We were matching throughout the summer as soon as we could, so it’s been really neat to see that things have been able to continue on. We’re very proud of the way we’ve grown this past year with the challenges and that we’ve been able to continue that support to our families.”

Commissioner Elliot Belgard noted that the Kinship program has greatly improved, and Commissioner Kathy Smith stated that the program is an asset to the Martin County communities and their families.