Recruiting men

Hi Heather! Welcome to the Forums...

It's not exactly new, but we did an issue of our NMC Bulletin on recruiting male volunteers several years ago. It had lots of good general advice. You can find it here: http://www.nwrel.org/mentoring/pdf/v2n2.pdf

On our MRC project, we also did a teleconference on this topic a few years back. You can download slides and audio from that event here:
http://www.edmentoring.org/seminar6.html

I'm sure that those running programs will have lots of innovations to share with you, but in my experience, the most common strategies I've heard are:

• Getting a core starting group of men who can ask other men and help with recruitment presentations. It really helps to have a male face involved in the ask.
• Approaching professions/businesses that have a heavily male workforce.
• Trying different mentoring models, such as group mentoring or whole family mentoring (where a family mentors together) to help ease men into the mentoring role and minimize their concerns.
• Focusing male recruitment on mentoring relationships that are very activity or community-service driven. This makes mentoring more of a "doing" thing than a "talking" thing (at least at first).
• Approaching fraternal organizations.
• Approaching men who have served as youth sports coaches, Scout leaders, or served in other volunteer capacities, such as through a faith organization or AmeriCorps. Instead of approaching all men, start with those with a track record of volunteering.
• Promoting the fun and good times that mentoring can provide.
• Using prominent male celebrities or athletes. Oregon Mentors did a great recruitment drive with Greg Oden of the Portland TrailBlazers last year. It would have worked even better if he could stay out of foul trouble for 5 minutes (sorry, frustrated Blazer fan here).

I'll post more if any come to mind. But I think most people in the field will tell you that the most important thing is to have another man asking. Get current or former mentors, even if they volunteered with another program, to talk about the experience and help with the "ask." And work on groups of guys... If you can land just one guy in a group of male friends, you can work with them to reach out to the others. We always respond to well-applied peer pressure! :^)

I'll be curious as to what new strategies and innovations others post to this age-old question in mentoring.