Stories of Hope

Written by Dru Ahlborg, Co-Founder and Executive Director of BRRC

Our organization, Bullying Recovery Resource Center (BRRC) defends bullied children and helps rebuild lives. We stand shoulder to shoulder with families deeply impacted from bullying to work together to surround the bullied child and hold the school responsible to stop the bullying. We work with families across the state of Colorado to offer experience, expertise, education, advocacy and HOPE. We often attend to families who are traumatized, angry and confused.  What follows are a few brief stories of clients and the eventual hope they experienced. (The names of the children identified below have been changed to protect their identities.)

• One of the first families we helped had a middle-school student who was terrified to go to school. Belle is a highly intelligent child who was relentlessly verbally and physically bullied during passing periods and on her way home from school. She eventually developed mental health struggles and had great difficulties attending school. Even after we assisted obtaining a restraining order against the girl who bullied her, other children took up the charge and the bullying continued. Belle’s mother made the hard decision to remove her from the school and move to another community over an hour away. This August we received a picture and a thank you from the Belle’s mother. Belle was photographed smiling in her freshman dorm room and was eager to start her next adventure.
• We assisted a family who had an 8th-grader, Jacob, with special needs who experienced extreme relational bullying. Students started rumors about him. Jacob was bullied online and was verbally abused. Students would pretend to become his friend only to turn on him. He was humiliated at a school dance. With our help and the tenacity of his parents, Jacob began to receive the services he needed to excel at school. About two years later BRRC received an email from his mother as she awaited outside as he was being interviewed for a job he was excited to be considered for. He ended up getting the job and became a valued employee of a speciality coffee shop.
• Clair’s mom found BRRC online as she was desperate to help her daughter. Clair was a high school senior who had aspirations of attending an Ivy League college the following year. Clair was racially bullied for being bi-racial and was the topic of horrific rumors started by several students in her grade. The school was not willing to follow through on stopping the bullying and Clair was able to finish her senior year online. Clair was safe, and incredibly sad that the school had failed to adequately address the bullying. During the holiday break of the following year, Clair contacted BRRC to state that she was loving her freshman year of college at a prestigious university. Clair sent BRRC pictures with her new friends that she had learned to trust.

One of our key performance indicators is hope. Outcomes of our work range from the school addressing the bullying to the school attacking the family who is speaking up. Through the process of empowering parents of bullied children, we strongly emphasize that no child ever deserves to be bullied, and that they are worth advocating for. Even when the outcomes are not optimal, the bullied child learns that someone other than their family is taking up the fight. They are important, they feel less alone and ultimately at some point they have an opportunity to experience hope.

If you know a child who is being targeted for bullying, and the school isn’t addressing the problem appropriately or at all, please contact us. We are committed to building a community of support to help families rebuild and recover together.

“We must accept finite disappointment, but never lose infinite hope.” — Martin Luther King Jr.