Our journey with Mentor Together
So, Charles and I at Samanvay Foundation have been working with Mentor Together for the past few months, building some of their pieces for their online mentoring programme.
Mentorship is the relationship between an adolescent and a non-parental adult who acts as a non-judgemental critic of the adolescent, plugs them into relevant networks and motivates them to achieve their full potential. Mentor Together’s website provides a nice overview of the purpose of mentoring.
Mentor Together is a non-profit primarily based out of Bangalore. They find adolescents who need mentoring and connect them to volunteer mentors. They also provide a curriculum for pairs to navigate their relationship and reap the benefits of mentorship.
We recently launched a new technology platform to provide online mentorship called Mentor To Go. The primary piece of this is an android app that screens potential mentors and mentees, provides online training for mentors, finds the right mentors to connect and serves an online curriculum that can be used for the mentorship.
Challenges
Keep it going
Wearing those gym shoes every day is a challenge, even if you are dead sure you need to shed those kilos.
One of the biggest challenges we face today is keeping pairs interested during the entire mentorship period. There are a few things we started with, and quite a few that are in the pipeline.
- Have a detailed screening process that looks at a mentee’s need for mentoring and a person’s (mentor or mentee)determination in going through the program.
- Match pairs based on interest areas and compatibility.
- Keep bite-sized sessions that can fit into the small chunks of time people find in a day. Allow most of the session content to happen alone with minimal mandatory mentor-mentee time.
- Allow pairs to plan their sessions through the app.
- Constant follow-up with pairs.
The last part is right now acting as a barrier to scaling up the programme. We are trying out many ideas to prod pairs to keep continuing automatically. The programme is still in its infancy, and we keep learning new things about what keeps pairs going and implement them.
Measuring progress and impact
Learning is tricky. A curriculum can either allow a learner to strictly follow the structure so it all makes sense as a coherent whole. It can also allow the learner to choose the parts they feel important for their goals.
Due to the inherent nature of mentoring, we chose to allow the learner to navigate the content on their own, and decide on their learning goals. This causes a challenge in measuring the progress of a pair. A pair could have completed all the sessions they feel relevant, and we could still not know if they actually have completed them.
Also, many of the learnings are soft and happens through phone calls that happen outside the scope of the application. It is hard to understand if the learning objectives of the programme have been achieved through the mentorship.
Other mentoring programmes run by Mentor Together fix this problem through constant engagement with pairs. Every call results in a transcript that is read by a human to evaluate progress.
Since we are giving up some of the control, the hope is that the interest levels of the pair, higher age of the mentee, the initial training of mentors, a structured curriculum and the focus on a narrower outcome will help mitigate the risks. Of course, it will take a couple of years of learning and research to see if this is true.
Technology
There are a lot of learning systems out there, but no defacto solution that expects a 1:1 student-teacher ratio with a high level of engagement. The software is a custom built LMS (of sorts) with just enough features to provide a compelling experience. It is a react-native based android app on the front-end and a Django web server. React Native allows a much faster development cycle. We at Samanvay have standardized it for mobile development within the foundation. Django provides quite a bit of functionality out of the box, and it's easy to find student python developers who can deliver value sooner. The tech stack has been around in Mentor Together before we arrived, so the choice was not hard to make.
Scaling (size) is today harder on the operations side of things, but we are constantly looking out for technology solutions that can help operations as simple as we can possibly make it.
