Month: August 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!!