What Are You Doing to Celebrate National Mentoring Month?

President Obama kicked off 2017 by declaring January National Mentoring Month. For mentoring programs and advocates nationwide, this month means highlighting program successes and the powerful stories of your youth and mentors, while raising awareness about the importance of mentoring to promoting positive outcomes for our youth and the need for mentors to work toward closing the mentoring gap.

What are you doing to celebrate National Mentoring Month in your program or organization? Our November Collaborative Mentoring Webinar Series webinar, entitled National Mentoring Month: Mentoring in Real Life, explored what programs can do to leverage this important campaign to activate their communities and stakeholders to volunteer as mentors or support mentoring in various ways.

This webinar highlighted the Mentoring Connector as a powerful tool for mentor recruitment, as the only national database of mentor programs and a free service that helps mentoring programs nationwide recruit local volunteers and increase the visibility of their programs. It also highlighted the 2017 National Mentoring Month campaign toolkit, which can help programs raise awareness about the need for mentors and ways to support their mentoring program throughout the month of January.

National Mentoring Month is also a time to collaborate, partner and connect with other practitioners and organizations to strengthen the mentoring movement nationwide. The National Mentoring Summit, which will be held on February 1-3, 2017, convenes youth mentoring professionals, researchers, philanthropic investors and government and civic leaders with the aim of collectively strengthening and expanding quality mentoring relationships for young people across the country. The theme for this year’s Summit is “Building Relationships, Advancing the Movement.” Find out more here.