?Who Mentored You?Thank Them and Pass it on.? Bloomingdale?s Proudly Celebrates National Mentoring Month With an Interactive Window Created by PS 59 Mentees

"Mentoring is a lifetime investment in our children and benefits the community."
-Matilda Raffa Cuomo

Bloomingdale's will celebrate Thank Your Mentor Day and National Mentoring Month and the store's long-term partnership with Matilda Raffa Cuomo's Mentoring USA program, the city's largest site-based, one-to-one mentoring program with a special window dedication on Thursday, January 15th at 9am.

Bloomingdale's recognizes the critical role that mentors play in the lives of today's urban youth. Through the Mentoring USA program at nearby PS 59, Bloomingdale's volunteers have mentored elementary school children for the past six years. Currently 70 mentors from the store spend an hour every week (Tuesday/Thursday) with their mentees, talking, doing schoolwork and dreaming of the future.

"Bloomingdale's is proud to have Mentoring USA as part of their Partners in Time initiative. This program is consistent with our goal of promoting volunteerism in support of education," said Anne Keating, Senior Vice President of Bloomingdale's Public Relations.

This year the window at Bloomingdale's will be filled with messages of thanks from the 70 P.S. 59 mentees to their Bloomingdale's mentors. The children were encouraged to create mixed media portaits of their mentors including a special message of gratitude. The result will be a window showcasing life size figures (like paper dolls) of mentors holding hands with mentees, each figure will be a different color, to represent leadership and diversity. There will be many more children figures than adults representing the need for more adults to enter into the mentoring program.

Mentoring USA (www.mentoringusa.org), founded in 1987, provides mentoring to particularly "at risk" populations: young children who are already experiencing difficulty or failure in school, children in foster care, children learning English as a second language (ESL), children who have been involved with the juvenile justice system, and children who have been homeless. Research increasingly indicates that those children who succeed, despite enormous personal, economic or societal obstacles, do so because of the presence of caring, competent adults in their lives.

A program of HELP USA, Mentoring USA operates 60 mentoring programs in the New York metro area, and provides mentors to 1,000 children between the ages of 5-18 every year. Mentoring USA's BRAVE Juliana initiative, launched this year, employs mentors to serve as ambassadors of cultural diversity to their mentees: adults work with youth on nonviolent conflict resolution and developing respect and compassion for others who may be different from ourselves.

Bloomingdale's, a division of Federated Departments Stores, was founded in 1872 and currently operates 31 stores in New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, Illinois, Minnesota, Florida, California, Nevada and Georgia. For website access, log onto bloomingdales.com.
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