Being blessed by true community partnerships

 About five years ago Bridges reached a critical point where we realized we were serving hundreds of middle school students each year and then sort of abandoning them when they got to high school.  High school students would come visit us at the middle schools and talk about the challenges of high school and how we really needed to have Bridges at high school because they missed it.

At this point in our ministry we were still really small and only had two full-time staff and one part-time, plus we didn't have much money or a place to run any kind of a high school program.  As an organization we began praying that God would open some doors and provide a way for us to meet the needs of our students.  Sure enough, God provided and made a way for us to continue being a part of our students' lives and their stories.

We knew that the program would have to be in the evening, because all of our staff would be with the middle school students everyday after school.  We also knew that the location of the program would need to be somewhere centrally located, since transportation is often an issue with our students.  The first place we thought of was the Kokomo YMCA.  We had a good relationship with the Executive Director, Dave Dubois, and it was the perfect location, plus they're a Christian organization.  Sure enough, when we approached Dave with the idea of running a Bridges Outreach program in the evening at their building, him and the staff at the Y were totally on board.  They were actually in the process of cleaning out a room that would be perfect for us and they said it was all ours, we could even decorate it and paint it however we wanted.

What a huge blessing!!!  All we were looking for was somewhere to hang out with our high school students for a couple of hours a few days a week and the Y blesses us with a place we can call our own! We quickly went to work painting, decorating and making the room our own.  We tried to make the room as welcoming and homy as we could, we even posted pictures of our students all over the room.

Over the next five years some pretty awesome stuff would happen in that room.  We spent countless hours with our students in there.  Helping them with homework, playing games with them and going through God's Word, teaching them about His unbelievable love and grace.  Eventually we hired a full-time staff person to run our high school program, which we named Bridges-to-College, or BTC, and we outgrew that room that the Y had blessed us with.  Then the Y went a step further and opened up the HYVE, their teen center, to our program and students.

This year we decided to transition our high school program and move it to Kokomo High School, with the hopes of having a larger impact and presence with the student body there.  We are an organization that prides ourself on the partnerships we've been able to build to better our community and specifically the young people in Kokomo.  Our partnership with the Y allowed us to take a program that did not exist, to a program that has served hundreds of kids each year.  As we move forward we're really excited about growing our program and really making an impact on the culture at KHS, but we wouldn't be where we are now without the support of the Kokomo YMCA!