Mass Mentoring Partnership has worked with dozens of employers in a variety of ways to engage their employees in youth mentoring programs and build lasting partnerships.

Workplace programs developed or supported by MMP include:

• State Street’s award-winning youth mentoring partnership with North Quincy High School, which expanded and deepened the company’s school-to-business initiative;
• Blue Cross Blue’s Shield’s Blue Scholars mentoring program, which MMP formally evaluated and provided recommendations on, and the company’s involvement in the North Quincy High School mentoring partnership with State Street; and
• A high school mentoring program for Digitas employees that focuses on technology-based projects.

In addition, MMP works with the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and its State Employees Responding as Volunteers (SERV) program, a workplace campaign that includes a mentoring leave-time policy for state employees, to communicate ways the volunteer release time can be used for mentoring activities.

MMP workplace program services

MMP is flexible in its approach to working with all types of workplaces to incorporate a youth mentoring component into its employee volunteerism/community affairs strategies. We typically do this in one of two ways:

Create or facilitate corporate-sponsored school- or workplace-based programs. MMP will work with companies to find appropriate community-based or school-based mentoring partners, and then help employers create programs. Our services include:

• Identifying high-quality youth mentoring programs from a selection of 165-plus agencies in Massachusetts, and facilitate partnership development;
• Providing targeted employee marketing and recruitment, including management-focused communications;
• Providing mentor and mentee training, support and guidance (with the help of community-based program partners); and
• Offering program development consultation and evaluation

Sporting grassroots, employee-driven programs by building awareness and meeting individual employee needs. Through this scenario, MMP helps by:

• Promoting mentoring opportunities to employees (brown bag lunches, mentoring fairs, e-mail, etc.);
• Providing information on various mentoring programs in the area to allow employees to choose one that best meets their needs;
• Providing the necessary training and follow-up; and
• Introducing potential mentors to MMP’s comprehensive Web referral system – especially helpful if mentors prefer to work with youth outside of an established corporate program

Costs
The cost of getting a workplace program started will vary depending on the approach that employers choose. All of MMP’s consultation, as well as any informational brown-bag lunches and mentoring fairs we conduct, are free of charge. Once mentors have been recruited, we typically charge a flat fee for on-site corporate training sessions; however, fees are usually determined on a case-by-case basis. MMP will also provide mentee training.

For more information about engaging employees in a youth mentoring program, contact Rich Greif at rgreif@massmentors.org.