Healing Camps
Empowering Children to Thrive Since 2011™
Sparks of Hope®
Programs
The goal of our Ignite Hope Mentoring Program is for the child/teen to establish a safe and trusting relationship with an adult.
What Is A Sparks of Hope Mentor?
A mentor is a trusted adult the young person has formerly established a connection with at our healing camps. The Mentor establishes a long-term, consistent commitment to the young person (called a “mentee”) by walking alongside them through the mentee’s healing journey, while providing support and guidance.
How Does It Work?
Our unique mentoring program matches our young person with two adults of the same gender. Our program encourages hope, healing, and trust in a safe and supportive environment. Having a relationship with caring adult role models helps empower the hurting young person to develop their true potential to discover their self-worth. By providing kids with positive adult role models, it inspires hope to help them navigate through life’s challenges growing up as an abuse survivor. It brings hope for a better future.
Mentors meet with their mentees twice a month. For safety and accountability, there are always two mentors to every mentee – one main mentor and one backup - the mentee is never alone with a single adult at any time – just as it is at our healing camps. Together, they enjoy activities of their choice, on their own schedule, and have fun experiencing new adventures and opportunities with a goal of building hope, healing, and trust while learning new life-skills and creative ways to cope with life’s challenges.
What Are The Benefits of Mentoring?
Studies show that mentoring is, by and large, an effective mode of intervention for vulnerable youth. Mentors help kids avoid risky and destructive behavior; encourage them to have greater confidence in themselves and their abilities. They also do markedly better socially and academically. Having the presence of adult role models in a young person’s life leads to a positive lifelong impact.
Ignite Hope - Mentor Program
Healing K9
Program
Our healing K9's Sparky and Zoey help child survivors of abuse gain courage when facing their abuser in court; healing the hurts of the past - loving on them every step of the way.
Both K9's are also present at SOH events and camps. Both are German Shepherds that come from amazing bloodlines and have been specifically trained specially for SOH work.
Our Ever Forward youth support program will serve to empower and strengthen children and teens from 8-17 years old as they address surviving trauma, body-image, anxieties, social belonging and academic stress, while learning healthy ways to cope in a safe and supportive environment. The supportive environment allows for processing life’s challenges with peer sharing and other healing techniques to help them give a voice to their feelings.
Our emphasis is on helping them express themselves further through creative and focused activities – sparking creativity through new and creative outlets of copying thereby empowering these young people to thrive.
We are currently develping our Parent Support Group, which we plan to launch soon.
Everforward - Youth and Parental Support Groups
Young Adult & Teen Speakers Bureau
“We Speak Out” & “Talk About It” is part of our powerful Prevention & Awareness Campaign. We are building a compelling program made up of inspiring speakers with empowering and impactful age-appropriate dialogue along with our impactful PSA to help bring about awareness to the silent epidemic of child abuse.
We Speak Out is a group of courageous and dynamic teens and young adults that speak to schools and community groups to educate and inform the public about the silent epidemic of child abuse. They share their personal stories (in age appropriate ways) of triumph over trauma to inspire and give hope. By sharing their stories, they hope to move others to come forward for the first time and get the help they need to heal, as well as empower children with the appropriate language to protect themselves to prevent child abuse, or help encourage children and teens to disclose to a trusted adult if they were or are now being abused – facilitating child and adult survivors to come forward to Talk About It.
If your school, community or civic organization is interested in booking our compelling and inspiring program, please contact us today at (503) 819-4011.
For more information about these amazing programs, please contact Lee Ann Mead at leeann@sparksofhope.org
Volunteer With US!
We are a 100% volunteer non-profit and rely on volunteers for every aspect of the organization. The value of a volunteer cannot be measured and we are thankful for ours.
There are many areas you can volunteer; camp, mentoring, support groups, media relations, hospitality, logistics, and many more. Please contact Lee Ann at the link below for more information.
"The best way to find yourself is to lose yourself in the service of others"
-Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi
