Donald Miller, author of Blue Like Jazz and several other books, grew up without a father. So for him, the increasing number of children being raised without a father or a male role model isn’t just a national issue—it’s a personal one as well. In his latest book A Million Miles in a Thousand Years, he talks about a movement he started so that young boys don’t have to grow up without a father figure guiding them. A movement that has turned into a full-blown organization called The Mentoring Project.

The purpose of The Mentoring Project is to connect mentors from local churches with boys between the ages of seven and fourteen who don’t have dads. Their current goal is 10 mentors from 1000 churches, creating 10,000 mentoring relationships. Mentors sign up for a two year commitment of spending one hour a week with a fatherless boy, doing anything from shooting hoops to building car models to just hanging out. Right now this program is based only in Portland, Oregon, where Donald Miller lives and works. But The Mentoring Project plans to expand into a national program by Fall 2010.

Part of the idea behind The Mentoring Project came from elephants. In his book To Own a Dragon, Donald Miller parallels the plight of orphaned elephants with that of boys without fathers, which he realized after watching a documentary about elephants in a wildlife trust. Teenage orphaned elephants often took out their aggression on other animals until older, mentoring elephants were introduced to them.

“I began to wonder if we guys were designed to have a father, whose very presence would cause us to understand more accurately what our muscle is for, what we are supposed to do with our energy,” he writes. (To read more of this excerpt, click here.) Donald Miller’s organization is helping young boys connect with older men who can provide that kind of presence and guidance in their lives.

Currently Donald Miller is on his A Million Miles in a Thousand Years tour, so if you want to hear more about his book or The Mentoring Project, check out his tour dates here. He will be in Birmingham November 19! You can also check out his blog and follow The Mentoring Project on Twitter to find out what he’s been up to.

Each week Bedouins International posts a story. Maybe it’s one we’ve helped to tell, or a story we hope to tell, or it maybe it’s just a story we think deserves to be told. In any case, we hope you find them inspiring and motivating. Read more stories here.