Mentors guide, challenge, and celebrate their students through their three years in the program. As a mentor, you’ll act as a caring adult in your mentee’s life, providing emotional and consistent support while sharing insight from your journey to college and beyond.
HOW IT WORKS
Minds Matter utilizes a 2:1 mentor-mentee model. A mentor works with their student alongside another adult mentor to form a triad. Every week, triads work through the Minds Matter curriculum, which guides students through exercises to develop the hard and soft skills they need to succeed in college.
Mentors commit to following their students throughout their three years in the program. Together, triads form the backbone of a student’s experience in Minds Matter.
KEY RESPONSIBILITIES
The mentor role is rooted in deep relationship building. To effectively guide, challenge, and celebrate their mentee, mentors exhibit and develop a few key characteristics:
- Your relationship is built over time, in and out of session, but the majority of your interactions happen during Saturday sessions. Showing up and being present at the sessions is the baseline for your effectiveness as a mentor. Mentors are required to attend at least 80% of Saturday sessions during the school year.
- Acting as a role model and caring adult for your mentee requires active listening, empathy, commitment, and integrity. Mentors must follow through on the commitments they make to their mentees. Unfulfilled promises negatively impact relationships, especially those with young people. Mentors act as role models to their own students and all the students on their team.
- While there are no required meetings outside of Saturday sessions, mentors should be responsive to short texts/emails from their students during the week and actively check in from time to time.
- All volunteers act as representatives of Minds Matter in and out of session and are asked to uphold the organization’s values and core beliefs.
ADDITIONAL REQUIREMENTS
- Mentors must have a 4-year college degree.
- Mentors must pass a criminal background check and undergo child protection training.
- Mentors work in triads to ensure students complete their assignments on time.
- Each co-mentor pair is asked to provide lunch for students on their team twice a year. The cost for each mentor is approximately $50 per semester.
TIME COMMITMENT
Mentors commit to volunteering with Minds Matter for 2-3 hours per week on Saturdays from approximately 11:00 am – 12:30 pm. Mentors should be prepared to commit to three years as volunteers as they follow their students through the program.