We have a waiting list of over 500 youth. Many of whom have faced adverse childhood experiences.  Our goal is to match them with caring adult mentors who can help them realize their full potential.  The challenge is that while we have mentor volunteers , they are not the mentor volunteers that we need . Specifically , we match youth with adults who are likely to be a great match. Parents often have preferences for a Big Brother or Big Sisters who look like their child. We have trouble recruiting diverse mentors who look like the littles we serve. Roughly 65% of the youth needed a mentor are BIPOC and many are boys.  However only 15% of the mentors are BiPOC.  

We need to understand more about any barriers to recruiting Bigs of color and also we need to understand other variables that may be at play.  Also we do our matching very manually. Is there a way to do it more automated - possibly using generative AI

I would love to be able to increase the number of matches we make  by increasing the number of suitable mentors recruited or by improving our matching process