FRAMEWORK OF MENTORSHIP - 4 STAGES AND UNDERLYING SKILLS
Mentoring centers on the creation of a safe and healthy relationship between a mentor and mentee. Our mentoring framework identifies 4 critical stages every mentor and mentee goes through:
CONNECT: Our first relationship stage helps mentor and the mentee establish trust, consistency and reliability in the relationship.By the end of this stage, mentors and mentees feel comfortable around each other.
Empower: In this stage, mentees work on those facets of their lives that they would like to empower through the mentoring. Mentors and mentees practice different life skills that can help them achieve their goals.
Level: In the second stage, we remove implicit and explicit power differences between our mentors and mentees. We establish a mutual or two-way relationship, where mentor and mentee both contribute to the relationship and learn from it.
Evolve: In this final stage, mentees work on their future life choices. Mentors help mentees in their decision-making. Mentors and mentees also reflect on their mentorship and decide the next stage of their own journey.
To help mentors and mentees in their journey to build an empowered relationship we have created a toolkit of 18 different life skills and work skills. Adapting from the UNICEF classification of skills, we’ve uniquely applied these skills to a mentorship context. Mentors and mentees practice them throughout the relationship.
Program Typology
In crowded classrooms and under-resourced communities, there are many children facing unique conditions of family, economic and individual risk. These risk factors if unnoticed and unaddressed can contribute to adverse outcomes like dropout or risky behaviours. Adolescence as a period of development is also a critical inflection point. As children mature, ideas of independence, self-identity, and the practice of autonomy become increasingly important. In our life skills mentoring program, we identify children facing conditions of high-risk, for an intensive 3 year intervention from class 8 to class 10. The goal is to equip the children with life skills to make a successful transition from high school.
13 - 15 years
Govt Schools, Shelter Homes
Community, School, Mentor Together Office
6 - 8 hours per month for a period of 12 months
Life Skills toolkit of 80 hours
Pune, Mumbai, Bangalore, Chennai, Delhi
India’s higher education system contributes about 3.5 lakh engineers and 2.5 million graduates, of which an estimated 5 million remain unemployed at any given time. There is an urgent need to invest early in young people in shaping their beliefs and orientation about work, and giving them actual career-focused learning opportunities. On the other side of this picture, in large work-forces around the world, employees, young and old alike, want greater meaning in their work; a desire to connect outside of the narrow confines of their formal roles. Our work skills mentoring program uniquely combines these two needs to create opportunities for young people to engage with professionals, at their work places; to understand and learn the skills sets needed to shape long lasting, meaningful careers.
Mentee age group
18 - 21 years
Duration of program
6 - 8 hours per month for a period of 10 months
Mentee identification
NGO partners like the Foundation for Excellence, India Trust and Magic Bus
Place of Mentorship
Mentors workplace, Mentor Together Office, NGO Partner Office
Mentoring Curriculum
Life Skills toolkit of 60 hours
Cities
Pune, Mumbai, Bangalore, Chennai, Delhi
The need for mentors is even greater outside of tier 1 cities, where young people have few role models to access and learn from in their immediate networks. Recognizing this need, we’re going mobile - developing a customized service on mobile for adolescents girls and a web-based program for young engineering students.
Mentor To Go
Mentee age group
15 - 18 years
Mentee identification
Communities in rural Karnataka predominantly for the pilot
Medium of Mentorship
Phone calls via a customized program app
Duration of program
6 - 8 hours per month for a period of 10 months
Mentoring Curriculum
Life Skills toolkit
For more information
www.mentortogo.org
Foundation for Excellence
Mentee age group
18 - 21 years
Mentee identification
NGO partner - Foundation for Excellence India Trust
Medium of Mentorship
Video calls and phone calls
Duration of program
4 - 6 hours per month for a period of 8 months
Mentoring Curriculum
Work Skills toolkit of 32 hours
Our Impact
Outreach
5
Cities
4
Peri Urban Areas
4000
Mentees
700+
MentorsOur Impact on Mentees
Mentees in our work-skills program have shown a statistically significant increase in their
Career Maturity, Emotional Maturity and General Well-Being assessments post mentorship.