Nina Hernandez, Executive Director, Featured in Yellowstone Valley Woman Magazine

“I kept wondering to myself: there has to be something more. There has to be something more innovative,” Nina says.

That something came along a couple of years ago, when multiple friends began reaching out to her about a new organization that was coming to Billings and was looking for an executive director. Nina started reading up on Friends of the Children, a nonprofit that was founded in Portland, Oregon, in 1993 and has since opened 32 chapters around the country.

“It just completely spoke to me,” Nina says. “It was something completely different.” Better yet, she says, Friends of the Children seemed to have developed a model that was potentially system-changing. She was hired as executive director in the fall of 2022, and Friends of the Children-Eastern Montana began offering its services in the spring of 2023.

Friends of the Children works by identifying pre-kindergarten children who would most benefit from the program, then offering them one-on-one mentoring for three to four hours a week, all year long, until they graduate from high school.