UM Volunteers Help Mentor Young Minds

By RudabehShahbazi

MIAMI (CBSMiami) – There’s a significant need for mentors, especially between the end of the schools day and when parents get home from work. Now thanks to a new program college students like Grace Migliozzi can help fill the gap for one student and her family.

Once a week, Migliozzi and Dayana meet at the Miami headquarters of the Big Brothers Big Sisters of Miami organization.

“It’s great, you get to make a lot of friends, it’s a space where I can be myself for real,” said Dayana.

This after-school mentoring program gives Dayana a chance to remain focused on school and her dance troupe.

“She’s such a genuinely good person and she’s trying so hard to stay on the right track and not hang out with a bad group of people and I want to be her role model and tell her she’s doing the right thing,” said Migliozzi.

Migliozzi is a freshman at the University of Miami, majoring in elementary education. She’s one of 23 students from the university who is able to volunteer in the community because of Big Brothers Big Sisters Miami partnership with Uber.

“I get here and I do my thing, I call them and they bring me back to campus. It’s super convenient and straight forward, definitely lets me do this which I’m super thankful for,” said Migliozzi.

It’s a win for Dayana as well who gets a big sister to give her advice and one-on-one help with her homework.

“When you do homework and she teaches me about history, she makes it fun, so it gives me a better perspective,” said Dayana.

And for Migliozzi, it’s those ‘a-ha’ moments that keep her motivated to give back.

“We were doing surface area and she didn’t know how to round the decimals and so I thought about it and I was like ‘what’s the best way to explain this to her’. So I did a lot of visuals because she’s visual and I’m visual and then when that switch went off and she went ‘oh my, I understand it’ and that was just the best feeling for me,” said Migliozzi.

Migliozzi and Dayana say they get along really well and look forward to their mentoring meetings until Dayana graduates from middle school in 2019.

Big Brothers Big Sisters is looking for mentors to volunteer to work with youth.

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