The average mentorship in the Big Brothers Big Sisters program, which is Connecticut’s largest volunteer mentoring network, is 2 1/2 years. But Nicola Culmo and her 13-year-old mentee, Jenalys, threw that out the window, as they’re going on seven years and are on the track for maintaining a relationship that’ll last a lifetime.
Culmo, who is a science teacher at Hall High School in West Hartford and was recently named Connecticut’s Big Sister of the Year, was searching for a way to give more love to the world as her children were already grown and she had extra time on her hands.