Mentoring is offered to children and young people as a vital support service. As with all services offered by Kids Inspire during the pandemic, mentoring is needed now more than ever.

The first mentoring cohort for 2021 recently met online to receive part-one of their official training. On Sunday 10 January over 30 new volunteers committed their free time (1-hour a week) to offer support, in the form of a ‘professional friend’, to a matched young mentee. Once part-two of training is complete (scheduled to be delivered this coming weekend) they will be introduced to a short or long-term mentee.  

One of our new mentors said: “Thank you so much for organising the great training session with lots of useful and applicable exercises.”

Another responded with: “I really enjoyed Sundays training and it was nice to see so many faces.”

We too were amazed by this new and welcome cohort of mentors who will be offering a listening ear to children as young as eight-years-old.

Young mentees may have previously received a course of bespoke therapy. Mentoring is offered as a step-down opportunity to test their empowering emotional resilience tools that therapy has awarded them with. In recent months, many Kids Inspire services have largely shifted online, and mentoring is just one example of this.

One Mentee recently said: “During lockdown, my mentor has been phoning me to check how I’m doing, we have been talking about any worries or concerns that I have.”

Another mentee said: “It’s helpful to go to my mentor for advice as I don’t always feel like I want to go to my parents.”

Mentors received training on:

• Hopes and fears of those involved in the mentoring relationship

• The structure of the mentoring relationship

• Exploration of attachment styles.

More information on the training can be found here.

Thanks to ICAP for funding our mentoring programme for the last three years. The programme has received additional top-ups from Nationwide and Aviva along the way and it really does make such a difference to so many young people for both short and long-term mentoring support.