Our community of budding ethnically diverse entrepreneurs met for the first time!
Soon after we held the mentoring workshop for the mentors of our Mentorship Program for Ethnically Diverse Entrepreneurs, we onboarded our mentees and matched them with compatible mentors.
On 1 September, we organized a briefing session for our mentees to help them navigate the Thinkific platform, where they can access the details of upcoming workshops and log their learnings.
But the briefing session also served another purpose.
At Foundation for Shared Impact (FSI), we understand that drawing upon our own expertise and insights to curate a program accounts for only half of its success – the program must also serve the needs of our mentees and enable them to apply their learnings to solve their day-to-day challenges.
That prompted us to turn the second half of the briefing call into an interactive session.
Through live polls and Q&As on MentiMeter, we helped our community of mentees understand the stage of development of each others’ companies, the main challenges they face, and how they think our Mentorship Program will help them overcome those challenges.
We also helped them recall their unique strengths (as individuals and as a team) and their support network that would be indispensable to weathering difficult situations in the future.
How the four-month journey ahead will unfold will vary amongst the mentees, but our mentees seem to be ready to embrace it with “an open mind”, “kindness to self and others”, and a “collaborative attitude”.
Problem-solving is an innate skill in all of us. Through our Mentorship Program, we look forward to helping our mentors and mentees build new skills and connections. But perhaps more importantly, we want to remind them of their self-efficacy and the existing resources and network that they can leverage to venture into new frontiers, and share their experiences and stories with others. As this community continues to grow, so does knowledge transfer, and shared impact is magnified.
Our mentees and mentors will meet in person for the first time next week, at the first workshop on goal-setting. Stay tuned!
*Interested in supporting our work on helping ethnically diverse entrepreneurs start and scale their business? Donate to us or get in touch with us on cbs@shared-impact.com!
