We Are All Mentors: Our Mentor Program Changes With the Times

Since the beginning of our Mentor Program in 1995, we have made hundreds of connections for LGBT applicants with those of you who have already been there. Some of these mentorship’s have been a short-lived exchange of questions and answers, many have continued well beyond the application process and some have gone from mentor-mentee to good friends. We have even had one proposal of marriage.

Until recently, the process started when a mentee made his or her application for a mentor from our website. That application was received as an email by two volunteers that split the duties and the responsibility of making these connections, typically based on the applicant’s gender identification. For several years those two volunteers mentor coordinators have been Anna Roche and me.

Anna and I that took the information provided by the mentee and, using our ever changing database of members, worked to find the best match based on gender, assigned country, region or area of interest, and job. With more effort we sometimes found a good match for the mentees near their home, allowing a mentor and mentee to move beyond email and telephone calls to sit down face to face for a discussion the challenges of the application process and complexities of being an LGBT volunteer in Peace Corps.

Unfortunately it did not always happen easily. In the world of electronic communication, having an accurate and current email address becomes essential. And with several hundred members moving about the globe, keeping a precise database was not possible. So after searching the database and finding what Anna and I hope to be a great match, we all too often did not receive a reply from our chosen mentor or, more quickly, received a fatal error notice regarding an email address.

To help prevent burnout within the small cadre that keeps our organization running and to catch up to the world of possibilities the internet offer groups such as ours, our Mentor Program has recently gone through some big changes.

To take advantage of the large number of people, be they Peace Corps volunteer alumni, current volunteers, former and current staff members or our friends, that populate our listserv, we have removed the limitations and difficulties of making a single mentor/mentee connection. In its place our mentee applicants are now asked to join our listserv and post a message about who they are, where they are in the application process, what country or region they are headed to or interested in and all the questions that are filling up their minds.

With the listserv now close to 400 participants, we have more than doubled our potential mentors. And our mentees are no longer assigned a single mentor. The listserv is their mentor and, for those reading the postings in the past few months, you have seen what a rich resource of mentorship we all are. Mentees are now being electronically escorted through the application process, receiving answers to questions from many points of view and getting referrals to contacts in their country of service.

Anna and I, as well as the rest of the Steering Committee, maintain a watchful eye on our ‘teenage’ program. We monitor the postings so that we can send our own recommendations and we will still make a specific mentor connection that we feel will assist a mentee.

So when you see future postings on our listserv with an introduction from new members of our group, please take the time to welcome them, whether on the listserv or by personal email. Introduce yourself and tell them about your connection to our group. We are all mentors and our efforts do make a world of difference to those future volunteers seeking information about the lives and experiences of LGBT Peace Corps volunteers.