Being Peer Mentors-In-Residence in the SocialVentures Zone

How we used our journey to guide the next generation of student social entrepreneurs at Ryerson University.

“Mentorship with SoJo means keeping my project on track. Helping me break the large, sometimes daunting tasks, into manageable steps which makes me feel like my project is rewarding again. I love SoJo’s approach because they provide real down-to earth support, and understand what you need to do in order to propel forward. An hour of mentorship feels like an hour spent with an old friend hanging out in a chill coffee shop. I always leave with a new and inspired perspective” — Jen Fischer, social entrepreneur and SVZ participant

Sometimes the best advice comes from your peers. That was our pitch when we approached the Faculty of Arts at Ryerson University on bringing us on as Peer Mentors-In-Residence to the first cohort of students in their new SocialVentures Zone.

SoJo’s first home was in the Digital Media Zone at Ryerson — it’s where we got our start, found help in the early stages and met a community of fellow entrepreneurs. Being located in the DMZ helped us to build relationships with the broader Ryerson community and the different changemaker student groups on campus.

Through these relationships, we learned that the Faculty of Arts was beginning to work on the SocialVentures Zone — a start-up incubator dedicated to social entrepreneurs and social enterprise ideas. We knew we wanted to get involved and could find a way to add value. We scheduled a meeting with Monica Jako, the Director of Strategic Planning, to share what we do.

At the time of the meeting, they were focusing on developing marketing materials to attract students to the Zone. Because of our expertise in understanding how to speak to students in simple, engaging ways, we were hired to help develop content for their website. It was a great starting point, but we knew we could do more.

The Objective

Most of the students entering the SVZ were coming from the Faculty of Arts or other social science departments and had limited exposure to the business world or start-up culture.

We knew from our own experience in incubators how few people understand the goals of social entrepreneurs and what an emotional rollercoaster trying to launch an idea can be. We also remember feeling completely overwhelmed by the new concepts and language you experience when pursuing a start-up. We know how vital it is to have people you can turn to who understand not only your goals, but your personal values and the experience you’re going through; and we wanted to use our knowledge to support the aspiring social entrepreneurs coming through the SVZ.

We also knew that by getting deeply involved in supporting these students, we would gain a deeper insight into how to develop the right tools and programs to help students to succeed, which we could later incorporate into our product and business development process. By embedding ourselves in the SVZ, we could gather the best market research possible.

The Setup

We pitched Monica on the idea of joining as Peer Mentors In-Residence. We offered to do this on a voluntary basis, in exchange for free desk space in the new SVZ. We proposed acting as casual advisors to the students on an as-needed basis to compliment the formal training and support they would receive through their courses. This engagement would last for the first year of the SVZ, or until it needed to be re-evaluated.

What happened

Our mentorship meetings with students were arranged through referrals from the Social Innovator-In-Residence who was teaching the formal training modules that all students received. Through these modules, he would identify students who would benefit from extra support. We would meet with students for 1–2 hours at a time, almost always on a one-on-one basis, and talk with them about their work and the challenges they were facing.

For the conversations, we adopted the approach of “Focus on the individual, not the idea”. As social entrepreneurs ourselves, we remember the personal struggles of feeling overwhelmed, confused and inadequate, and that these emotions left unchecked would become obstacles to moving forward on the idea. At SoJo, we believe that if the person behind the idea is suffering, the idea will inevitably suffer. Building the confidence of the individual creates a strong foundation on which to build an idea. Besides, the training modules the students received were all about supporting their idea, so we wanted to ensure they received personal and emotional support as well.

The Results

During the course of the year, we mentored six students. Each student came with their own set of issues and challenges and they were all at different stages of their development. All conversations would begin the same — I would ask them to tell me “how it’s going”. Starting with an open ended question allowed them to push the conversation in whatever direction they wanted.

Some valuable tricks I use is asking follow up questions like “how are you feeling about [it]”. When someone is at the earliest stage of their idea development, asking about something as simple as their thoughts can be overwhelming because they’re not always sure what to think; however, they almost always can describe how they feel.

The other question I never ask is “so how can I help”. I believe as a mentor that it’s my job to listen carefully and identify the type of help I think they need and suggest it. If they know what kind of help they want, that’s great, but I don’t assume they do. There was nothing more frustrating when I was just starting out than meeting with an advisor, pouring out my challenges and the struggle I was experiencing, only to have them respond asking how they can help. Didn’t I just tell you what I need help with? Everything! In the earliest stages, people often don’t know what they don’t know, so they don’t know what kind of help they need or what’s available to them — they just know they need help. Using these tools in my meetings resulted in powerful, engaging conversations, and students often said they walked away with a new sense of purpose and focus.

At SoJo, we always believed that supporting the individual was vital to incubating a new idea, but this mentorship experience helped to validate that belief among our target audience. We’ve since taken this insight and have embedded across all of our products and services.

Lessons Learned

We learned a lot through this experience, both about how to be effective mentors and how to validate our ideas. Here are some of our key takeaways from the experience:

• Personal and emotional support for student entrepreneurs is just as important as business support. Often within the first few minutes of speaking with us, students would comment that they felt an enormous weight lift off their shoulders as they would describe their fears and the things keeping them up at night — things they otherwise wouldn’t talk about with advisors. Once that burden was lifted, they were able to approach their ideas with a new sense of clarity and purpose.
• Find ways to embed yourself in your target market. We had suspected that the post-secondary market was a huge potential market for our services, but we needed the right way to test that. By joining the SocialVentures Zone, we were able to get to know the needs of the students we would be serving, as well as the needs of the administrators who were running (and funding) the space, and better identify the value proposition we could make to them both.

Interested in working with SoJo? Want to learn more about this case? Contact us at connect@mysojo.co