What are you doing for National Mentoring Month?

We are a small rural mentoring partnership funded by OJJDP and in our first year of development. What I noticed in our area is that there is little known about mentoring, its possibilities and challenges. We are without a state mentoring partnership (California), and since we are in a rural region, our partnership is much more intimate and hands on.

We are planning on developing a "corps" of leaders in our community who can actively help us spread the word. On January 24, we are holding an event we're calling "Champions for Mentoring". The idea is to inspire, educate, and mobilize cross sector leaders in our community about the benefits and challenges of youth mentoring. We'll open with a presentation on the need- educating them about where we need to make a difference. We will then have a quick workshop session where we will divide our audience and send them around the room to the various programs and partners, who will do a quick game or demonstration. To conclude, we will bring them back together, honor some special matches, and then go forth with a call to action- recruit 100 potential mentors in 100 days.

We're aiming for local media attention (newspaper and radio), as well as getting our town and county officials involved. Business sponsorship in this economic clime is more apt to be goods and services than financial, but we're honored for any support at this point!

I'll let you know how it goes. I think there is vast potential for collaborative effort among programs and agencies in our area and am excited to be engaging and serving them.

We will continue to use our blogs to tell the story of mentoring and tutoring, both from a single program perspective, and from a citywide perspective.

I would like to see more programs using blogs to show what they do in their programs, and to educate supporters as to what they need to do to provide operating dollars, support the growth of leadership, and encourage ongoing volunteer involvement, in different programs in different areas.

Since there are a larger number of participants joining this forum, perhaps anyone who is writing blogs in Mentor Month could post links to their blog articles here? That way we could increase readership and visibility for every program that uses the internet to tell their story.