In order to better serve their respective communities, the Manitowoc County and Sheboygan County chapters of Big Brothers Big Sisters have decided to join forces to create Big Brother Big Sisters Wisconsin Shoreline effective April 1st.
We spoke with Denise Wittstock, the Current CEO of the Sheboygan County branch, who said the two organizations have been working together for the past 8 months to bring this all together.
Wittstock explained that each organization is, from a legal aspect, their own individual corporations with non-profit 501c3 status. This means that from a legal perspective, the Manitowoc County branch will technically not exist anymore, and Sheboygan will remain and go through that name change. “Our teams will join together,” Wittstock said. “and we will really be able to scale all the resources and programming that we have been working on in Sheboygan for the past decade…and bring them to the Manitowoc Community.”
For those who are unaware of what BBBS does, the basic idea is they pair at-risk children with adults, to help keep the children on the right path. The variety of children that take part in the program spans a wide margin.
“We have kids in our program that have very loving, two-parent households, and we have kids in foster care, and everything in between,” Wittstock explained. “Kids are referred for any number of reasons, but one is may parents don’t have the experience that they are looking for for their child. We get to know our Littles very well, we get to know our Bigs very well, and we make really thoughtful matches of where we think a friendship really has the chance of thriving the most.”
Some of the programs that will be brought to Manitowoc is the Bigs with Badges program, where the children, known as Littles in the organization, are paired up with adults, or Bigs, in Law Enforcement, their new high school based academic program, Project REACH, and several others.
For more information, or to sign up to be a Big, or to refer a child to be a Little, either call 920-458-0111, or visit BBBSWIShoreline.org.