eMentoring

On Monday, Sept 12, the eMentoring program held a community lead orientation at our eHealth office in Vancouver. This was a great opportunity for all of our awesome community leads to meet and share their experiences with one another. Aboriginal eMentoring BC is a province wide program and there are 5 community leads located in different areas throughout the province. The community leads are responsible for mentee recruitment, promoting the eMentoring program, meeting with Chief & council, parents, teachers and answering general questions about the program.

The purpose of the day long orientation was for everyone to meet one another, discuss their experiences in the project and leave with resources to help them during recruitment. Throughout the orientation, a bunch of topics were covered ranging from developing agreements with partnering communities, overview of the mentee curriculum, how to match mentors and mentees, recruitment successes and challenges, the research aspect of this project and more. Overall, everyone had a great time and we all learned a lot from each other!

Our leads and the communities they represent include:

Diane Anthony – Adams Lake Band

Luwana Louis – Sto:lo Nation

Chris Alexander – Okanagan School District (SD23) and Westbank First Nation

Elizabeth Nicholas – Akisq’nuk Band

Nahannee Gillett – Urban areas/Surrey school district (SD36)

The eMentoring team has partnered with the Indigenous Leadership Development Institute to develop an online Aboriginal Cultural Awareness course that all eMentors will take before they are paired with their mentees.

The course is self-paced and based on previous knowledge of Aboriginal people in Canada. It will take between 1-4 hours and consists of the following four modules:

~ The Important of Culture and Cultural Awareness
~ Aboriginal Peoples of Canada
~ Canadian History from an Aboriginal Perspective
~ Past, Present and Future Challenges for Aboriginal Peoples

After each module, mentors must score 100% on a multiple choice test before moving to the next module. This is meant to be an introductory course that will facilitate cultural competency in eMentoring relationships. Mentors will also attend a mandatory orientation session that is scheduled for Saturday October 15th, 2011.

We have begun interviewing our potential mentors and have met a lot of amazing people! It’s interesting to see the diversity of students this program has attracted. We have many applicants and in order to interview them all in a timely fashion we have designed a custom interview structure where interviewees are asked a few questions on several key themes. We are happy to say that a large majority of these applicants are very promising mentors and now the next step is for us to complete reference checks, have criminal record checks done for each potential mentor and to decide how we can most accurately assign mentees to mentors. Because we will focus on mentee recruitment in September, matching mentees and mentors will take place afterwards. We will have one or two more scheduled interview sessions in order to fit all applicants in and then before we know it, training will begin and we will be officially launching the project! Time is just flying by!

Throughout the summer, the eMentoring team has been engaged in several mentee recruitment activities. The team’s first stop was with the UBC Summer Science Camp. Talk about a motivated group of kids! Nahannee, our Urban Project Lead, was able to sit down with them during one of their lunch breaks and chat about the program and about being mentees. After an exciting two weeks at the UBC campus, the eMentoring program would be an excellent bridge to maintain their interest in post secondary and also in the Health Sciences. After being allowed to speak with them, not only was Nahannee invited for lunch but was also able to enjoy a drum and song performance by one of the kids!

Next stop was Community Day for the Cedar Science Camp. This was an exciting day filled with fun speeches, activities and an enjoyable song and drum performance by members from the Musqueam Nation. Throughout the day, the team had a chance to distribute brochures and talk to several parents about the program. Many of the parents seemed quite excited and wanted to sign their kids up. This was great to hear as a critical part of this program is getting support from parents! Overall, we met alot of great people and will be getting in touch with everyone over the next few weeks.

After a few wrong turns and semi-correct Google driving directions, we managed to make all our scheduled meetings in the Surrey School District! Each school had very interesting and important questions about eMentoring such as how mentors and mentees would be paired, how the conversations would be monitored and would students receive any credit for participating. Overall, we felt very confident with the positive energy and constructive feedback that we received from each school. It’s great to see the enthusiasm to be part of eMentoring!

As the kids are out of school for the summer, we will be returning to Surrey in September and visiting the same schools again to participate in their Aboriginal assemblies, talk with (potential) mentees and to get these kids excited about being part of eMentoring! Here we go!!

Another full but successful trip!  It’s amazing how much you can accomplish in two days and eight meetings.  Special thanks to Johanna Sam from UBC-O who helped us accomplish so much.  The goals of this trip were to start a plan on how to recruit mentors from UBC-O and further develop our partnership with School District 23 and Westbank First Nation.  We met with a variety of interesting and passionate people, including Aboriginal educators, school administrators, university administrators, artists, students and a coyote. All believed in the usefulness of the program and the potential of eMentoring to make a positive impact (except perhaps the coyote)….but who knows 🙂

Accomplishments included getting four UBC Departments on board to recruit mentors, meeting with over 30 Aboriginal Advocates from School District 23, continuing the conversation with the school district on how to implement eMentoring in a way that complements the ongoing work within the district and answer some research questions they had about mentoring Aboriginal students in general.

Issues raised that continue to resonate with communities include: the question of having the mentees and mentors remain anonymous and what type of mentee we should be offering this opportunity.  For the most part when we go on these trips, people have concerns about mentees and mentors remaining anonymous for a number of reasons.  One is that kids are highly likely to want to tell their mentor specific information about them.  As a parent, some people we met with were concerned that parents wouldn’t let their kids be mentored by someone anonymous.   What do you think?  

Ended the trip with some Frisbee and waterslides!  We had to do something to beat the Canucks-no-sun blues.

Want to help Aboriginal youth become excited about learning and school?

Want to be a role model and make a positive impact on the lives of youth?

Want to gain volunteer experience and enhance your knowledge of Aboriginal history and culture?

Then apply to be an online mentor. We are currently looking for UBC students from all faculties who are over the age of 18 to be mentors.

As a mentor, you will be responsible for meeting online 2-3 hours a week with your mentee for a minimum of one school year (September – June). Mentors will support youth as they work through a curriculum that covers topics such as career and college/university exploration, goal setting and transition to college/university, challenges and school supports, time management skills and more. Additionally, mentors will also receive training in child safety; self-esteem and child development; activity planning; cultural awareness training (e.g. Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal worldviews on mentoring, understanding cultural identity, Aboriginal culture and history).

If you are interested, please go to the “get involved” section of our website to fill out an application. The deadline to apply is July 1, 2011.

We are excited to announce that the winning entry for the eMentoring logo contest was drawn by Jesse Tobacco from Boston Bar Secondary School. Jesse drew a beautiful logo with many elements representative of Aboriginal culture. The concept of her logo is about traditional community and each of the elements in her logo represents a different idea. The cupped hands represent the unity that comes with community; tobacco represents tradition and traditional methods; elder berries represent traditional medicine; medicine wheel represents health and the eagle represents heritage and culture. We will be putting this logo on our website and recruitment brochures/posters that are going out to communities, teachers and youth across BC.

Lastly, we also want to say a big thanks to all the other students who submitted an entry!

We had a chance to visit the beautiful Kootenays on May 22-25.  Overall, a really productive trip! Went into it thinking we weren’t organized enough and hadn’t planned enough meetings.  But as it turned out we got more accomplished than we imagined.  The main purpose of our trip was to meet with members of Akisq’nuk First Nation near Invermere, BC.  Akisq’nuk is one of four communities within the Ktunaxa (teh-NUH-hah) Nation within Canada.  Their traditional territory extends down into the States. Akisq’nuk Chief and council were very supportive and agreed to go forward with the program.  That same day, we held a community info session and had a pretty good turnout: about 20 parents, kids, and community members in total.  We asked the kids what their least favourite and most favourite subject was in school and who was their role model.  For many kids we had to explain what “role model” meant, which made us think we should change the questions to “who do you look up to?”

The next day had lots of surprises.  At first we thought we’d have a lot of time to kill before our flight in the evening as we only scheduled two meetings.  One of these meetings was with a wonderful Aboriginal Support Workers at David Thompson Secondary School in Invermere.  She was very excited about the program and suggested her students be able to take it for credit.  She had some good suggestions too, such as making a virtual café for mentees to talk to each other and identifying which students would really need an Aboriginal mentor versus those that would be ok with a non-Aboriginal mentor.

After that we drove to Cranbrook to wait for our flight.  Little did we know that we’d be chatting in Aq’am (St. Mary’s Band in Cranbrook) for most of the day and getting the Aq’am Education Director on board too.  It all started with a drop-in visit to Nigel (our co-worker on another project).  We were reminiscing about the music workshop we planned a few years ago and he asked us to follow him to the basement of the band office, where he gave us a copy of a totally AWESOME CD called “Ktunaxa Pop” – a collection of techno kids songs sung in in Ktunaxa that they’ve been using in the daycare.  Anyways, I digress, but digression is how we got things done this trip!  That’s when we met the education director who we chatted with about first the CD, then eMentoring.  Next thing we know, she’s inviting us into her office and figuring out how to bring eMentoring to their school.  Couldn’t have planned that!

On May 9^th and 10^th, eMentoring visited a number of schools attended by Adam’s Lake Band students in Salmon Arm and Chase.  There was also an information session for Adam’s Lake Band Community Members to discuss the question, “What is eMentoring?” 

Over the two day visit, the eMentoring team travelled to Shuswap Middle School, Salmon Arm Secondary  School (SASS-Jackson Campus), Chief Atahm Immersion School, Haldane School, and Chase Secondary School  to speak with the schools’ respective Vice Principals and Principals.  The team talked about what eMentoring is and the Principals and Vice Principals talked about which students might be a good fit, and how the schools can help support their students through teacher awareness and computer lab access. 

Despite a number of softball and soccer games going on in the community, the information session saw excellent turn-out and participation of Parents, Students, and School District Administrators.  With snacks and juice in hand, the future eMentoring Mentees talked about their favorite subjects and what they would like to be when they grow up, while parents asked about how the program worked and the benefit it would have to their children and community.  At the end of the session a ‘Talking Rock’ was passed around and the session was concluded with everyone’s observant and enthusiastic closing remarks.

It was a real treat to visit with the Adam’s Lake Community and we’ll see you online in September!