MENTOR Joins Forces with LinkedIn to Mobilize Members to Mentor

Screen Shot 2015-08-06 at 11.04.23 AM(Boston, MA) – LinkedIn, the world’s largest professional network on the Internet with 380 million members worldwide, is leveraging its powerful social media platform and community to mobilize members to mentor. MENTOR: The National Mentoring Partnership (MENTOR) is proud to team up with LinkedIn on this initiative to elevate the impact of mentoring relationships and call on more adults to mentor young people.

MENTOR’s research in a report called The Mentoring Effect found that young adults who were at risk for falling off track but who had a mentor were 55 percent more likely to go on to college and 78 percent more likely to volunteer regularly in their communities. Yet, one in three young people is reaching age 19 without ever connecting to a mentor either formally through a program or informally through family, community or social networks. MENTOR CEO David Shapiro shares his thoughts on mentoring’s connection to growth and opportunity for young people in America via LinkedIn Pulse.

As MENTOR celebrates its 25th anniversary, this new joint venture is representative of the organization’s efforts over 25 years to build a movement in support of quality youth mentoring relationships.

“We must close the mentoring gap so that no young person grows up without the critical support and connection to opportunity that a mentor provides,” said David Shapiro, CEO of MENTOR. “LinkedIn members understand the importance of relationships and connections to succeed professionally and by engaging in a dialogue on this topic we can activate people to pay it forward by mentoring a young person.”

According to a recent LinkedIn survey, 79% of LinkedIn members who signaled they are interested in doing skilled volunteering, would likely consider a mentoring opportunity.   LinkedIn will use its platform to help connect these 4 million members with opportunities to serve as mentors for underserved youth. 

Beginning today, on a dedicated website – mentor.linkedin.com – LinkedIn will feature member stories that demonstrate the transformative potential of mentoring relationships both in the workplace and in communities between adults and young people. LinkedIn Influencers, a select group of leaders in business and industry who publish articles on the platform, will also focus their upcoming posts on the topic of mentoring.

As a key player in this effort, MENTOR is providing expertise on the key ingredients of quality youth mentoring as well as thousands of volunteer mentoring opportunities for LinkedIn members to connect with. These opportunities are sourced from MENTOR’s Mentoring Connector, which is the only national database of mentoring programs that are screened for safety and effectiveness using the national standards for quality youth mentoring, The Elements of Effective Practice for Mentoring™.

This national initiative provides a truly unique opportunity to draw the critical connection between career mentoring and the link to social and economic mobility created by mentoring young people.

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About MENTOR

MENTOR is the unifying champion for quality youth mentoring in the United States. MENTOR’s mission is to close the “mentoring gap” and ensure our nation’s young people have the support they need through quality mentoring relationships to succeed at home, school, and ultimately, work. To achieve this, MENTOR collaborates with its network of affiliate Mentoring Partnerships and works to drive the investment of time and money into high impact mentoring programs and advance quality mentoring through the development and delivery of standards, cutting-edge research and state-of-the-art tools.

Contacts

MENTOR: The National Mentoring Partnership              Jennifer Merrill, 617-303-4612, jmerrill@mentoring.org