Mentoring
About the Scheme
The Voyage mentoring scheme aims to support young people as they gravitate towards higher education and professional life. This is a priority for Voyage as we wish to maximise retention values with our young leaders after they graduate from our unique Young Leaders for Safer Cities programme. We believe this links to the greater issue of black young people not having enough guidance post-GCSE, lacking confidence to apply to Russell group Universities thus culminating in a lack of direction and commitment.
As a result, Voyage has developed a mentoring scheme to improve retention and provide greater guidance and support to our young leaders. It is important that we use mentoring as a mechanism to increase our young leaders understanding of different industry areas, enabling them to migrate to adult life productively and successfully. This can be achieved through our mentors improving the young people’s academic, professional and personal capabilities.
However, we do not want to prescribe an arbitrary structure, as mentor-mentees relationships should develop naturally and organically. The mentoring scheme should also be beneficial to our mentors. We would like our mentors to enjoy the experience and approach and we believe the process is both mutual for mentees and mentors. Above all this is an opportunity for our mentors to understand the minds and narrative of our young leaders.
Our mentoring scheme combines a mix of professional mentors from our corporate partnerships and links to our ground breaking partnership with Black Men For Change.
If you are a young person please follow the survey links below to register interest:
https://www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/Q2R78LF
If you are a mentor, please read on or email us to express interest here…
Our aim
The aim of mentoring scheme is to provide an enriching experience for our mentors and transformative experince for our mentees. Our vision for mentoring complements our employability framework, were we will be provide skill-based sessions, industry insights, business challlenges and work experience. Through this framework we aspire to equip our young leaders with the expertise and confidence needed to enable a seamless progression into employment. We hope that the mentoring sessions, will allow our young leaders to gain new skills, whilst weaknesses will be addressed. Overall, mentoring is a crucial part of Voyage’s strategy, as it improves the retention and prospects of our young leaders.
The process begins by us gathering information on both mentees and mentors via a survey. Please note that any information that is obtained form you will be handled in accordance with the GDPR guidelines. All relevant information given will be stored on our central data base that is controlled by Voyage, and no other external party.
What Mentoring Means to Voyage
Despite the mutual benefits, mentoring is important to Voyage because mentoring helps frame our ethos of progression for our young people beyond their tender young ages right into their careers. Mentoring also creates an atmosphere for young people to learn and pick up skills that will be beneficial beyond their time at Voyage. This we believe is particularly important, and should not be minimalised but rather embraced, allowing mentors to have a real impact on our young people.
Why Is Mentoring Important?
Mentoring is a great way to increase one’s confidence especially in the field of careers, whilst creating professional bonds that will add substantive value to both the mentee and mentor. Also, mentoring is a great way to get to know, and learn things outside of your normal environment. This could potentially help you become more relatable and add towards character building.
Despite the mutual benefits mentoring is important to Voyage because, mentoring helps frame our ethos of progression for our young people beyond their tender young ages right into their careers. Alongside, creating an atmosphere for young people to learn and pick up skills that will be beneficial beyond their time at Voyage. This we believe is particularly important, and should not be minimalised, but rather embraced to allow a real impact to happen.
Before You Become a Mentor
What are the Pre-Requisites?
DBS Check
Health and safety awareness
Some awareness of problems young people currently experience
Informal Pre-Requisites
Passion
Availability
Open Mind- to be willing to learn about the BAME background etc
Positive attributes
Non-judgemental
Awareness of a Young Persons needs or worries
The Benefits of Mentoring
Develop further communication skills
Recognition for helping young people
A sense of fulfilment
Potentially be influential towards you advancing in your career
Mentoring sessions will be adaptable to your availability
How to be an Effective Mentor
To be an effective mentor, we want you to be you! We believe in the idea of uniqueness, this is because, what your mentee would want is a real insight towards your own personal experiences, and tailored advice from you.
To be an effective mentor, we would like to see a range of traits such as positive influential characteristics. This is advised, because this will be communicable to your mentee, which will allow them to become more confident, and have an optimistic view on life and their future goals. As well as being an honest individual, who can be the reasonable perspective for your mentee. Additionally, a social individual who can be relatable, and willing to share your experiences. Lastly, effective communication is necessary for both your mentoring sessions and your communication with us an organisation. As we would expect you to relay, any information across to us about the wellbeing of your mentor, especially if you have any safeguarding concerns.
Who Do We Work With?
The young people who attend our Leadership programmes are students and Voyage graduates who live and attend school in some of London’s more challenging boroughs. Where they face a range of different situations, both of negative and positive nature. We work in these boroughs like Hackney borough, to provide effective schemes that can prevent exclusion, trauma, and crime within the Black and ethnic minority community’s living in these boroughs.
We consider the young people living in these areas as vulnerable due to the often-negative behaviours that they can be exposed to on a regular basis as it is where they live and go school. Working with the young people who live within these types of environment is both a challenging and rewarding experience.
Preparing for Mentoring
What Will Mentoring Look Like?
It is envisaged that mentors will meet up with young people on a weekly or bi weekly basis during term time (September to June). So it is important that we get our mentors equipped to respond to the challenges and issues of our young people which will include a focus on:
