English pages Mentornetwork

Here is our brochure Mentor Network pdf

Together with our Swedish partner Minerva, we are running the Mentor Project MiA pdf

Mentornetworks Newsletter pdf

Contact us here! 

 
Mentornetwork in Trondheim, Central Norway. 

We started Mentor Network, in 2006 after a visit to KVINFO in Aarhus and Copenhagen,Denmark, and was greatly inspired by what we saw. We went home and established our own mentoring scheme adapted to the conditions in Trondheim.In 2009 we received funding from the EU to start the project MiA together with our Swedish partner, Minerva. 

We saw that there were many people in the community who have skills that are not valued or used. This could be a question of highly qualified doctors who were unemployed due to a very rigid set of rules in order to practice in Norway. Many of those receiving social security and many had given up his or her dream to work as a doctor. We also met people who had no formal education but who might have worked as a sheep herder in Somalia.  Other persons worked with the family with household tasks like cooking for a big family, cleaning and care tasks caretaking. We believe that this is valuable expertise that should be more recognized by the business sector.

The Mentor scheme

To run a mentoring scheme is about creating relationships that can develope into strong self-propelled network. To achieve this we need to ( connect people/ make people meet)put people in connection with each other. We do this based on what we have learned from interviews with mentees and mentors. We are very careful when we invite the parties to the first presentation meeting. The factors we are looking for here is professional. Somebody who has a goal to cook in a restaurant should have a mentor who is a chef. We're also trying to match two of the same sex: A woman gets a female mentor and a man gets a male mentor. Sparetime activities and other interests and age also play a certain role, but perhaps the most important factor is, who will be able to get a good targeted communication? This is a subjective assessment that we make and during the presentation meeting, we often find out about our assessment was good enough.

Collaboration
After a successful presentation meeting starts the parties their cooperation. They write a contract that includes how their contact form should be and what they should work with together. The important thing here is what the mentee wants to achieve. The goals should be mentees own goals and not what the mentor thinks the goal should be for the mentee. Cooperation form is usually one-to one conversations. The meetings can take place in the mentors work place or at a cafe or a library. Some also choose to use e-mail active, phone or sms. We assume that the parties are using approx. 2 hours per month over a period of one year. Along the way, we offer counseling on how to get the mentoring relationship to work and we have regular evaluation calls. We let it be up to the mentor and mentee and forming their own cooperative. Mentor Network provides the framework for cooperation. Mentor and mentee take the challenge to achieve a good result.