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I'm not sure if you are aware of this or not, but January is National Mentoring Month. And so rather than waiting till later on in the month to mention this, I was like, you know what, why not go ahead and get it out there ASAP so that people can take full advantage of the month because I often feel like you don't do because you don't know. So maybe you didn't know that this is National Mentoring Month, but now that you do, you can do something about it. Maybe you've thought about being a mentor and just didn't know how to get started.
Well, guess what? I've got the answer for you. So never fear, keep listening right here. Now, but maybe you've never considered being a mentor because you're thinking to yourself like, oh, well, I don't have a really great job or I don't have any real skills that I could pass along to somebody to give them any advice or anything on.
But guess what? You don't have to have a skill to be a mentor. Sometimes it's just life experiences that make you the perfect person to be a mentor to somebody else, especially a young person. Did you know this that there is a mentoring gap?
I'd never heard of this until I started doing some research about mentoring. But what they're saying is that one in three young people out there in the world, they're growing up without this critical support of having a mentor. And just imagine you could volunteer your time to help out another person, especially a young person out there and could make such a drastic difference, not only in the life of the person that you're mentoring, but also in your own. Would you ever find yourself in a bind where you need to know something and don't know where to go to find it?
Go to your smartphone or your computer and just look the darn thing up. That's exactly what I did with mentoring. And guess what? The very first website that I came across was for an organization.
Their website was mentoring.org. Mentor is the name of the group. It's the National Mentoring Partnership and it's a nonprofit 501c3 organization. So first off, you know exactly what that means.
That it's probably a pretty good place to make a donation to Chiching if you want to have some type of impact on mentoring. However, before you go handing over your coins to the people at this website, you got to make sure you do your homework. So that's what I did. I continued to kind of scroll through their website and I ran across an impact statement and it read as such.
After rigorous screening for Proof of Impact and Ability to Scale, Mentor was included as a member of the Social Impact 100, signifying that it's one of America's top performing 100 nonprofit organizations. It also showed that in April of 2020, Mentor was again awarded a four star rating from Charity Navigator, which is the largest and most utilized evaluator of charities in the United States. Well, right there, I was sold because what? Those were the receipts that I needed.
I can look up that information and determine, are they telling me the truth or did they just make this up? Easy day, right? So I continued to read some more because now I'm intrigued. It's like, oh, so y'all are a pretty good organization, huh?
Let me see. What do you do? How do you do what you do? Before I got that far, I found their why.
And basically, the way that they present it is that potential is equally distributed, whereas opportunity is not. A major driver of healthy development and opportunity is who you know and who's in your corner. Amen, church. Amen.
It's all about who you know. You can have all the knowledge that you want in your head. But if you don't know anybody, it's going to be awful difficult to get that knowledge to somebody else. So the fact that they're talking about making those connections, I'm loving it.
And basically, 30 years ago was when Mentor was created and that was what their goal was to focus was to expand that opportunity for young people by building a youth mentoring field and movement, serving as the experts and go to resource on quality mentoring. And what was the result from that initial idea? A more than 10 times increase in the young people in structured mentoring relationships from hundreds of thousands to millions. I love this idea, this concept.
For the simple fact that there is that disparity where there are kids out there that need someone to talk to them that need some guidance and they don't have anyone, there's nobody that looks like them or that's from where they're from that has a good word to put in their life, to put in their spirit, you know. And so I love the idea of Mentor. I know you're probably saying this sounds great, but you said this website that this group is out of Boston. I don't live in Boston.
So how is this supposed to help me really? That really, well, don't worry, they got you covered because one of the very first things you'll find on their website is a form to fill out where it's talking about engaging with your community. So you'll find a reset process that will put you on the path to mentorship, simple and plain. You use your name, your email address, your zip code, the distance from you that you're willing to work within, and then you got three topics to help filter as far as finding the right fit for you.
So the first one is youth population served, the age of youth served, and the type of mentoring. I did the search. It came up with four places where I am and I'm sitting here like, wow, hello, and let me see, I'm going to shorten my distance and see if that makes a difference. And within five miles, I was still able to find two.
So I'm thinking that the database that they're using is fairly large for it to just randomly have information on some groups in my area as close as five miles within my zip code. So you know what? It can't hurt to try it. So once again, the website is mentoring.org.
And like I said, it's right there. You scroll down and three steps. So now that I've put my information in, I've hit that send button and it's shot off a couple of options for me. Click on the links, see what they say.
And from there, they have like a kind of almost like a demographic type page that comes up. And it tells you the age of the youth that served, the meeting area, program focus, types of mentoring opportunities, if there's disability information, and whether or not they're currently accepting volunteers. Now that may be the hardest part of the whole thing is that because of these COVID times, they may not be accepting volunteers. However, you know where to go, how to find them, and then how can I help when things get a little bit better?
Everything I've mentioned at this point has been talking about mentors for young people. And where that is definitely a big need in the community, please, by all means, just because you're older, don't think that you've aged out of possibly needing a mentor yourself. Because there's always going to be somebody out there that knows more than you. They're going to know more people than you.
They're going to have more experience than you. You can always learn something from somebody. So it's just a matter of finding that somebody. And it is a lot harder as an adult, I think because adults, we tend not to want to ask people for help.
Therefore going to someone and saying, hey, I could really use some guidance. Would you consider being a mentor to me? I know that sounds weird. So if you want to college your board of directors or whatever other fancy description you want to give, that person is actually giving you some life lessons to live off of, then call it what you will.
But don't think that you're an island and you can do all this by yourself. What the help that you need? If you know that getting some more information, some more knowledge is going to be able to catapult you to a new level of life, then why not? Why not go for it?
You know, you ask somebody, all they can say is no, or they can say for sure, grab you by the hand and escort you into those rooms that you didn't have access to before. So stop being so prideful, stop being scared, nothing to be scared of. And if you know who that person is, a lot of times we know who the person is that we would love to be able to have some type of relationship with to help guide us through. Go ahead and do it.
Step out on faith and say, you know what, I'm going to put myself out there. I'm going to introduce myself. Or if it's somebody that you already know, I'm going to let my friend or a colleague know that I could stand to use some assistance. And I think they're the perfect person for it.
I think if anything, people will be flattered to know that you feel like they have something that you could benefit from. Well, I hope you have enjoyed today's episode and I hope that you would also go check out the mentoring.org website and possibly consider giving them a donation because once again, there are 501c3 organization and I think your money going to them would actually do a lot of good in community. So check that out. Another thing I want you to check out, I didn't mention it, but I cannot leave here without saying this.
They are sponsoring a national mentoring summit. The dates are January 27th through the 29th. It is virtual so you don't have to worry about going anywhere and getting contaminated. But they have a speaker spotlight and the two people that they highlight.
One being Soledad O'Brien and the other is a gentleman by the name of Wes Moore who is the chief executive officer of Robin Hood. I don't know if you've heard of the app or not, but that's who he is. So if you are interested, they also have their agenda listed on the website. Check it out.
An investment in this particular event is an investment not only in self but in community and your fellow man. So you can't go wrong. Check them out. Check it out.
They've got lots of resources there for you. And hey, until Thursday, have a great one. You know where to find me.