After months of preparation, the mentoring committee is excited to announce the launch of MentorND, a mentoring platform powered by People Grove, available exclusively for members of Thrive! Our aim is to facilitate mentoring opportunities for Thrive! members with the goal of enabling women to reach their highest potential and enabling knowledge and skill transfer to assist with the retention and advancement of women on campus. This new platform provides the opportunity for members to connect with one another organically and also houses our mentoring program which allows us to match potential mentor pairs and provide some structure around what to expect.
While the platform is different, our philosophy remains the same. We believe that each of us has something to offer and that mentorship doesn’t have to be restricted to leaders at the highest level of the organization mentoring those more junior in their careers. We are interested in seeing women with strengths in certain skills and competencies, or with unique work experience, being empowered to share those strengths with others who could use guidance in those areas. In our model, all can both mentor and be mentored.
We are still in a testing period, so members who joined as of the cutoff in August will be invited to participate in this pilot program. We will invite potential mentors to create profiles first, as well as those who are interested in being both mentors and mentees. We will then open the invitation for mentees to complete their profiles. This will allow mentees to view mentor profiles and favorite any that stand out to them, providing us an additional data point for matching. Our plan is to complete two rounds of three months each to test the platform and program functionality, as well as the matching, gathering feedback as we go. It is our hope that with a successful pilot, this program may be rolled out for the entire campus community.
Click here for more information on MentorND. For questions about MentorND contact mentor@nd.edu.