The mentoring rewards

•  Nonprofit takes mentoring to a new, international level

•  “Most of us are mentoring all the time, we just don’t realize it”

(Total Recorded Time is 17:42)

When an organization’s leaders give informal but special attention to those with potential but less experience, it’s often called mentoring.

But can something so informal be organized?  Yes, says Deborah Heiser, who leads just such an organization.  

The Mentor Project began casually when Ms. Heiser, an applied developmental psychologist. talked with a small group of friends about the need to match students with top experts in a vast array of fields, centering on the “STEM” fields of science, technology, engineering and math.  

The non-profit organization now provides free mentorship to students in elementary school through university.

“Most of us are mentoring all the time, we just don’t realize it,” Ms. Heiser says.

The Mentoring Project, which she co-founded, started small but has grown quickly.  “It moved from 10 (mentors) to 60 to 80 to a hundred,” Ms. Heiser says. 

“Our organization was built on mentors who didn’t have a way to connect with mentees,” she says. “We’ve been doing it for about five years now and we’re in five countries.”

She says it’s not just the students who benefit from the program. “The benefits of mentorship for entrepreneurs is tremendous,” she says.

Ms. Heiser is the author of the new book, “The Mentorship Edge,” (Wiley; 1st edition, November 2024).

For more information: www.mentorproject.org and www.DeborahHeiser.com