January was National Mentoring Month! We at Community Engagement wanted to say: Thank you to our Middlebury College mentors!
National Mentoring Month (NMM) was created by the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and MENTOR in 2002. The month aims to focus national attention on the need for mentors, highlighting how we all—individuals, business, government agencies, schools, faith communities and nonprofits—can do our part. For the past 14 years, NMM has celebrated mentoring and the positive effect it can have on young lives with the goals of raising awareness of mentoring in its various forms, recruiting individuals to mentor and promoting the rapid growth of mentoring by recruiting organizations to engage their constituents in mentoring. This year, NMM’s theme is Mentor in Real Life, lending way to discussion of mentoring’s real life benefits. In Vermont, the organization Mobius, Vermont’s Mentoring Partnership, is an NMM ambassador.
The month works to celebrate and set apart the special role that mentors play in the lives of others through various events and days of gratitude. All the while, we must remember that our involvement, gratitude and excitement for volunteerism and mentorship cannot be contained to a single month, and instead needs to carry us throughout the entire year. It’s never too late to go forth and thank the mentors in your life, and to also consider stepping up as a mentor in the life of someone else!
Interested in volunteering as a mentor? Here at Middlebury, Community Engagement supports a number of student-led mentoring programs, including: Community Friends (1-1 mentoring for local children) and Xiao Pengyou, DREAM (group-based mentoring), MiddCAM (high school student mentoring for college-access initiatives), Sister-to-Sister and Brother-to-Brother (with a focus on middle school children), Page-1 Literacy (school-based literacy programs) and NOM (nutritional outreach and mentoring).
To find out more about any of these programs or how to get involved, visit go/CE.
Questions? Contact Nestor Martinez with Community Engagement at nmartinez@middlebury.edu or at 802-443-3010.
Nestor Martinez '10 on behalf of Community Engagement
