When entrepreneur Duncan Campbell founded Friends of the Children, he turned a simple idea into a revolutionary new model for helping at-risk children.

Campbell’s own troubled youth provided the impetus for founding Friends of the Children in 1993. Together with a team of respected researchers, Campbell found that the single most important factor that fosters resiliency in high-risk children is a caring and consistent relationship with an adult.* Based on this research, they designed the Friends of the Children model to enable each at-risk child to form, sustain, and be deeply affected by a caring and consistent one-on-one relationship with a professional adult mentor, whom we call a “Friend.”

*Smith, Ruth and Emmy Werner. Overcoming the Odds: High Risk Children from Birth to Adulthood. New York: Cornell University Press, 1992.