Start a peer mentoring program at your school.

Education is one of the leading causes amongst the younger generation today. Whether it's in your high school or your neighborhood community center, mentorship programs are a great way to promote learning. Maybe you want to be an older sibling for other kids. Maybe you want to help someone who’s being bullied or is at risk of dropping out. Look into a mentorship program that you know of, or use the information below to start one of your own.

How to Create Your Own Mentorship Program:

Let's Get Together

Get a few of your friends together to discuss your idea.

• Goal: To get older students to help younger students become familiar with high school. Mentors will show younger students around the school, talk to them about their worries, and help them in any way possible.
• How: Recruit mentors by advertising around school and asking friends and acquaintances. Devise a “mentor training program” complete with ice-breaker activities designed to get students to feel comfortable with each other. To get more mentors, offer some sort of small reward.
• New Students: The idea would be that every new student would get a Junior or Senior peer mentor to help them throughout the year. The mentor and the student would have meetings (to discuss problems) and orientation days (to explore the school).
• Result: A more accepting and less intimidating environment for new students, a school wide sense of camaraderie, and a fun activity for all students.
• Another Idea: If the mentoring program could be integrated into school hours and everyone could participate, we could achieve these results on a greater scale.

Make a power point presentation or a brochure of this plan to present to your principal and other teachers. You can do some research on other great peer mentoring programs and how they work here: http://www.mentors.ca/mentorprograms.html.

Sign Ups

Make posters and place mentor sign up sheets all over school. Get the word out about what you're doing and why. Make people care about your cause and join your effort.

Start It Up

Get things going. Start the program by having “mentor training sessions” to make sure the students who volunteered are going to be good mentors.

• Training sessions should consist of exercises in communication and guidance. Match mentors up in pairs and have them do a scavenger hunt (to see how well they know the layout of the school). Get partners to set up sensitive dialogue and reactions to practice. Have mentors score each other's performances after these activities.
• A good mentor will be one who listens and does not judge, knows his or her way around, and is able to communicate in a positive way every day.

Once you have the right amount of people, start your program. Match mentors with younger students and organize meetings, orientation days and fun events for them.

There may be a few problems with your program in the beginning— but don't give up! If a mentor and a student don't get along, match them with other people. Make the program fun and casual (it shouldn't feel like being in class), but make sure everyone knows their boundaries.

Other things to think about

• How many times a week/month do the mentor and mentee meet officially?
• Where are the meetings held? You may want to discuss this with administration. Perhaps classroom space or a space in the gym or audience is available.
• Don’t let the mentor meetings become a bore! Create a fun environment that people will want to return to – sports, games and activities that go beyond homework and talking are always a plus.
• Food can also be a great way to bring the mentors and mentees together. Mentors can take turns bringing in snacks or baking brownies.

If you’d like to join an established mentorship program or need extra help starting your own, checkout the following links:

• Big Brothers Big Sisters of America:http://www.bbbsa.org/
• EMT Website:http://www.emt.org/publications.html
• National Mentoring Center:http://www.nwrel.org/mentoring
• National Mentoring Partnership:http://www.mentoring.org