#002: Helping people help each other
Part I: Idea and Inspiration
Today’s edition is about a 7-minute read. If you’re in a hurry, here are the takeaways:
Over the next three weeks, I’ll be talking about RISC’s mentorship project, where we want to make it easier to start mentee-driven mentorship programs. In this post, I’ll talk about the idea and the inspiration behind it.
RISC had been interested in mentorship for a long time before I joined, but our ideas hadn’t gained traction. I thought we might find new opportunities in the problems faced by mentorship programs.
Mentorship programs are mentor-mentee matching machines, but the typical matching process creates a suboptimal experience for mentees for three main reasons: (1) matches sometimes don’t work out, (2) mentors have limited lived experience, and (3) it’s hard to switch mentors or find additional ones.
By flipping the matching process on its head and letting mentees pick their own mentors, mentorship programs can alleviate some of these challenges, but there aren’t great tools for building mentee-driven mentorship programs.
Our idea is to build a web tool that makes it easy to start mentorship programs that empower mentees to find mentors for themselves. With such a tool, existing programs could improve the experience for their mentees and scale their programs, and groups without mentorship programs could start good ones easily.
When I hear the word mentor used, the connotations are often professional. I hear about experienced individuals recounting a career’s wisdom to aspiring youngsters. To me, mentoring is this and much more. I think of organizations like Project LETS, which specializes in peer support for people with mental illness, and GoodKids MadCity, which brings together youth in communities affected by gun violence. In organizations like these, mentees see themselves in someone else who shares their lived experience (often someone who isn’t much older than them), and mentoring is a back-and-forth conversation about life.
Professional or otherwise, mentoring does a bunch of good for everyone involved, and it’s especially important for people at the margins of society.
Over the next three weeks, I’ll be talking about RISC’s mentorship project, where we want to make it easier to start mentee-driven mentorship programs. In this post, I’ll talk about the idea and the inspiration behind it.
RISC has been interested in mentorship for a while
When I started at RISC in August 2020, there was already interest in a mentorship project. Along with our own anecdotes on the positive effects of mentoring, there is pretty clear evidence to support the positive psychosocial benefits of mentoring for mentees and mentors. We imagined a world where anyone struggling with something could talk with someone who’s been through a similar experience, and we had been searching for ways to make that a reality. Our team’s ideas seemed to be fizzling out by the time I got to RISC, but I was personally interested in mentorship and ready to inject some new energy into the cause.
Having just graduated college, I knew that a lot of mentoring was happening through mentorship programs, and I had experience as a mentee, mentor, and program leader. Existing programs supported many people, but those programs were also struggling to provide a good experience for their mentees. It felt like there was an opportunity to tackle the challenges of mentorship programs while making mentoring accessible to anyone.
Mentor matching limits the mentee experience
Mentorship programs are mentor-mentee matching machines with some additional structure. Mentees enter a program by filling out a matching survey. A few days later, they receive an email with their mentor match (or mentor family). The matching process is typically manual, with program leaders looking through matching surveys and selecting mentor(s) they think will be best. Some programs have curriculum, events, and expectations around mentor-mentee conversations, while others leave it up to mentors and mentees to explore their relationship.
If you want concrete examples of mentorship programs, check out the University of Chicago’s Maroon Mentors, Stanford’s Economics Peer Advisors, and the University of Michigan’s SIBS Program.
The system works well for getting a mentor to every mentee, and many relationships are successful. But as a former mentee in this system and from talking to mentees in other programs, there are some shortcomings with mentor-mentee matching:
You sometimes don't vibe with your match. It’s something you’ll know within a few minutes of chatting, and it’s unfortunate when it happens (and it has happened to many of us). It can be even worse if you’re matched with a mentor who is largely absent or never even returns your emails.
Advice is limited by the lived experience of your match. My mentors were helpful for questions about classes in my major or general college stuff (like where I could find the best chicken fingers on campus), but none shared my identity as a first-generation college student nor my interest in nonprofit work. This lack of shared perspective made it hard to bring up certain challenges and questions related to those parts of me.
There is no built-in way to switch mentors or find additional ones. Of course, you can ask the program administrator for a new match (but risk hurting your mentor’s feelings), or you can go to the program’s website and find another mentor (but that assumes (1) there is a website, (2) the website has the relevant information, and (3) you feel comfortable writing an email asking someone to be your mentor).
During my junior year of college, I started a mentorship program with a friend to try to solve some of these problems, and it was harder than expected.
There’s a lack of tools to build mentee-driven programs
My mentorship program in college tried to put radical empowerment into the hands of mentees, letting them choose their own mentors by reading mentor bios on our website and reaching out to whoever they wanted. Mentees were encouraged to find mentors that spanned their whole identity. The thought was that a first-generation college student studying economics and interested in a career in academic research could use our website to find one mentor studying economics, one mentor with experience in academic research, and one first-generation mentor (if they couldn’t find one person who matched all three criteria). We also gave mentees the option to get matched, but we matched them with multiple mentors in order to make sure all aspects of their identity were covered.
We had over 50 students come through our program, and I would guess that 50% of them asked to get matched and 50% reached out to mentors directly on our website. Despite our decent engagement, we still felt like our program needed improvements.
University IT helped us make our website, and we designed it so that you could filter mentors based on tags related to their experience. But it would take months to get a hold of IT whenever we wanted to make basic changes, and mentees still needed to email mentors in order to start conversations, which takes a confidence that I didn’t have as an underclassman. And because Christina was the only one with site access, she had to manually copy and paste updates to 20 mentor bios every semester.
Basically, it was possible to start a mentorship program that put mentees in the driver’s seat, but it took a lot of work. And it still wasn’t everything we wanted!
Enter RISC
As my team at RISC was talking about helping people find mentors, I thought back to what I knew.
Mentorship programs existed locally everywhere, and they served a lot of people
Most mentorship programs provided a limited experience for their mentees
Starting a mentee-driven mentorship program was difficult with existing tools
What if we just made it easier to start mentee-driven mentorship programs? If going through University IT was such a hassle and resulted in suboptimal websites anyway, we could make a software tool for creating websites designed specifically for helping mentees find their ideal mentors.
Some existing mentorship programs might not be interested in switching their model, but that would be okay. Other existing programs might adopt a mentee-driven model in order to improve the experience for their mentees. And if we could help manage the demands of their programs, they could even scale to reach more mentees. For groups without mentorship programs, we would be making it easier for mentorship to exist.
If enough people started mentorship programs, we would be providing the tools for communities to build our imagined world where anyone struggling with something could talk with someone who’s been through a similar experience. Sure, it was a long shot, but we would have done some good if only five new mentoring relationships were sparked by our work.
So that became the idea! We would build a free software tool that would allow people to start mentee-driven mentorship programs.
Jeff and Steve liked it enough to let us try it, but we would have to find someone to develop the software. We ended up finding someone, but that’s a story for next week.
Until then!
Noah