Men in Mentoring Recruitment Toolkit
I am currently serving as an AmeriCorps*VISTA member at Mentor Michigan. One of the biggest problems that mentoring programs report is recruiting and retaining male mentors. To help mentoring programs face this challenge, Mentor Michigan created the Men in Mentoring Toolkit. These tools and resources are all freely available to download and use!
You will find several useful resources in the Toolkit. The Toolkit outlines the key components of an effective recruitment message, provides tips for handling male volunteers from application to match, and suggests talking points and approaches based on different audiences. The toolkit is available in PDF form and in audio podcast form. Additionally, there are PPT slides that can be downloaded and used for training purposes.
You can find and download the toolkit HERE.
MENTOR recently featured Mentor Michigan in a webinar on recruiting male mentors. The focus of the webinar was to learn more about the Men in Mentoring Recruitment Toolkit. You can access the audio file and PowerPoint presentation at http://www.mentoring.org/find_resources/elements_of_effective_practice/e....
I was on the male recruitment webinar yesterday. I wanted to thank you first of all for an excellent presentation. The ideas were clearly presented- very thought provoking. It led me to a conversation with my colleague afterwards regarding how and if programs are capable of taking on such a resource intensive strategy.
In terms of the capacity of recruitment staff to "close the deal", I have concerns that most people working in this capacity don't have the sales skills necessary. Most recruitment staff also double as case managers- a skill set that seems quite different. In this economic climate, programs simply do not have the resources to have a specialist devoted to the time intensive recruitment strategies needed to get more men involved. It leads me to a couple of questions: If more resources, both financial and human, are needed to recruit men, will that change the notion of mentoring as a cost effective strategy? Should we be looking at using those resources in a different way then?
Thank you again for such an engaging webinar! I hope the forums can be used to expand the dialogue!
About 20 years ago one of my volunteers came to me and said he was in a marketing class at his grad school, and his team wanted to do a project for our tutoring/mentoring program. I asked him to figure a way to increase the percent of African American male mentors.
He came back a few months later with the paper, showing an "A+". I asked him to form a team of volunteers over the summer and launch the campaign in the fall. He did. We increased our participation of minority men from 5.4% to 13.5% the first year, and our overall base of volunteers by 20%! The second year we went up to 14.5% with another 20% increase.
The only active recruiting we did each year was to focus on increasing the involvement of minority men. What we did was simple. We created a template letter, and sent it to current volunteers asking them to identify men at their companies and in their social networks who they could send the letter to. This resulted in more people being involved in volunteer recruitment, which led to the overall increase.
We also identified clubs and fraternities with larger concentrations of African American men and sent information and did presentation about volunteering.
This program was located at the Montgomery Ward headquarters complex in Chicago and students and volunteers met from 5:30 to 6:30pm when the volunteers were out of work. It was 25 years old in 1990, and led by a team of nearly 60 volunteers who held full time jobs at Wards and other companies, with a paid staff of only three college students each working about 20 hours a week. All space and materials were donated by the company. Snacks were donated by the Quaker Oats company.
We had about 300 volunteers when we launched this campaign. When I left the program in 1992 our base of volunteers was over 550 coming from more than 100 different companies in the Chicago region.
Thus, there were two keys to our success.
a) you have to be operating a well organized program where your current volunteers are satisfied and enthusiastic about recruiting people they know
b) you have to target your invitation to the people you are trying to recruit
Come to the Tutor/Mentor Leadership and Networking Conference in Chicago on May 27 and 28 and learn from others how they are recruiting and retaining volunteers. See www.tutormentorconference.org
Dan Bassill
President
Tutor/Mentor Connection
Cabrini Connections
Thanks for posting this!
Mike Garringer
Mentoring Forums Administrator
503-275-9747