We are incredibly proud to share the news that iMentor is partnering with Facebook to pilot a groundbreaking new mentoring product built into the Facebook platform.
Mark Zuckerberg announced the partnership today at Facebook’s second Social Good Forum. On the power of relationships, one of iMentor’s core values, Mark remarked that “relationships really shape our lives a lot more than I think we realize. And if our relationships can help us set our sights just a little bit higher, then we would all be better off for it.” The potential of mentoring and dearth of high quality opportunities to access this support became apparent to Mark, he shared, over the course of his country-wide listening tour this past year.
During his remarks, Mark highlighted Kaylee and Barrie, an iMentor pair, as an example of the power of mentoring. Barrie has been instrumental over the years in Kaylee’s journey from high school to college and today, Kaylee is thriving as a student at SUNY Geneseo.
Since inception, iMentor has leveraged the power of technology to create mentoring relationships and experiences for more than 26,000 mentors and young people. The launch of Facebook’s Mentorship and Support product is a game changing advancement for the field, with the potential to help millions of people access supported, structured, and high-impact mentoring experiences.
Mentorship and Support is designed to help people build mentor-mentee relationships so they can meet and learn from each other no matter the distance that separates them. A cohort of iMentor pairs will use this new mentoring product during their freshman year of college. They will continue to engage with iMentor’s curriculum through the pilot, while also providing valuable feedback to Facebook about what it’s like using the social network to continue building their relationships as they navigate college.
As iMentor continues our journey to support more first-generation college students in the pursuit of their dreams and ambitions, we are thrilled to partner with Facebook to explore new avenues for bringing mentoring to all of those who can benefit and learn from it – both mentees and mentors themselves.
If you’d like to learn more, you can watch Mark’s announcement, read Facebook’s newsroom coverage of the pilot, see photos of the event, or read this Mashable article about the pilot. And if you would like to get involved, either as a mentor, donor, or partner in this work, we hope you will reach out via [email protected].
