NosVies

Series: social entrepreneurship, helping others, contagious attitudes

Nowadays there are numerous programs for both men and women who have decided to give a helping hand to young people who are in trouble or simply facing their future alone.

Through a dynamic relationship, they are sharing their experience, their know-how and their worldview with youngsters.

Call it sponsorship, mentoring or coaching, whatever name it’s given, it’s a tangible, proactive, human relationship first and foremost – a partnership that exists to point to other possibilities in life, to provide new breathing space, to help find new ways out of a rut - a partner who explains and always listens patiently.

After all, when you’re bent on becoming an athlete, a surgeon, an entrepreneur, an artist or a craftsman, what’s more inspiring, what’s more real than talking to one? What’s more motivating than to meet people who have overcome difficulties and succeeded against the odds in unsympathetic environments?

This is an approach that interests me a lot. Certainly, I gave from the time to time courses to children in fairly underprivileged areas and coached the members of my teams in the professional realm. But I’ve never taken someone under my wing to guide – other than my own four young children, of course!

In the meantime, I’d like to make my contribution to all forms of mentoring through our drawings with Clement. If you like them, e-mail them, print them, post them up!

Help get them circulating, especially around social associations and social entrepreneurs who help others to come to grips with their lives, to explain what you do, recruit mentors or raise funds. 

This is also the desire and the project shared by my fellow Daniel Bassill, who is working to bring together mentor associations at the Tutor/Mentor Leadership and Networking Conference in Chicago in mid-May 2007 in order to enhance the renown and impetus of such institutions.

Dan focuses on building the infrastructure that supports the growth of volunteer based tutoring/mentoring programs in inner city neighborhoods.

While he brings people together for conferences, he also draws people to a library of information at http://www.tutormentorconnection.org, and has organized a blog exchange, that encourages people like me and you to become active in building a network of volunteers, leaders, donors, etc. who will all work toward building this needed infrastructure. Check his blog as well.

Dan suggested that we do this cartoon for the conference. He’s hoping that other graphic artists and infomantics specialists will be inspiried by what we have done, and will find ways to use their own talent to draw volunteers and donors to tutor/mentor programs throughout the world. We wanted to do a series of illustrated post on mentoring anyway so this is just the perfect opportunity to spread the message through a wonderful initiative.

Use our cartoons, add your organization logo on it in the upper left corner if it helps, just credit us back for it with a link to our site. If you need help to add your logo, just email us.

Send us other ideas for cartoons that might strengthen your mentor mission. And give us all some inspiration and tell us about your experience as a mentoring organization, as a mentor or as a protégé.

Update: In the French version of this blog post, I have added some links to mentor organizations and I got feedback that people applied to mentor kids thanks to the post. Since I became n#1 in google on the search “motivating people to become mentors”I am going to add some links here as well. There are many great mentoring organizations but I am going to list a few main ones. Please contact me to recommend more in areas not covered.

-  Mentor.org regrouping hundreds of organization in the USA

- Big Brothers Big Sisters: very successul national mentoring organization in the USA and in other countries as well

- European Network of Children and Youth Mentoring Organizations: with a long list of European mentoring organizations