As the summer sun kept shining in Crosby’s Serpent Park, children and mentors from Kinship Partners’ Crosby chapter took to Serpent Lake on Thursday for their first ever Fishing Buddies event.

“A lot of kids in the program talked about wanting to go fishing. They don’t have that opportunity to maybe get in a boat and have their own stuff, and so I thought to myself, ‘Well, I have a lot of friends that, you know, they’re outdoorsmen and they love fishing and the outdoors,'” explained Kinship Partners Program Coordinator Tyler Scull. “They maybe don’t look at themselves as a mentor because they’re not a coach or a youth minister, but in fact, they are.”

As a whole, Kinship Partners works to connect kids with other community members in order to provide role models to children within the community.

“For 36 years now, we’ve been around. We also do school-based programs, Lunch Buddies, a peer-to-peer program,” said Scull. “All the facets of mentoring and building relationships and all the positive things that happen when you have someone in your corner that cares about you.”

While Kinship Partners aims to get kids involved with members of the community, events like this wouldn’t be possible if it weren’t for local businesses such as Crosby’s own Oars-N-Mine.

“Oars-N-Mine, they provided the bait and [senior living center] Heartwood provided meals for all the adults and the volunteers and their parents,” added Scull. “We won’t will be able to run the way we need to for the community and not only the businesses, but the people. Kinship Partners needs to be a community-run program.”

Kinship Partners hopes that Fishing Buddies will become a tradition for their organization and the Cuyuna Lakes Area as a whole.

“We’ll hopefully continue getting kids in the boat. We might not have it be a giant orchestra of, you know, 12 boats or something like that, but we want to just try and get kids opportunities to just get in boats and fish, have fun,” explained Scull. “Find a hobby they like, but also just get out and about and be with adults and have kids on in their corner.”

Kinship Partners also hopes to continue its Lunch Buddies program to connect students with one another once the school year starts. More information on their programs can be found on their website.

By — Justin Othoudt