Mentoring is one of oldest ways that people have found to connect with each other and be changed in the process.  One would think that quotes like these would seem like old hat, and yet, stories of successful mentoring relationships still inspire.

The goal of iMentor is to unleash the intrinsic power of mentoring – at scale and with consistent impact – to enable young people to achieve their highest educational and career aspirations.  While there can be a natural power to a mentoring relationship, it is not easy to create and is even more difficult to sustain.  iMentor tried to tackle three challenges traditionally faced by mentoring programs:  how to match thousands of students with mentors rather than a handful, how to ensure that these relationships are all impactful rather than a small percentage of them, and how to bring the power of mentoring to every young person, not just those who might opt-in to a mentoring relationship.

Mentors make a minimum of a 3-year commitment to their mentees and engage with them weekly online and monthly in person through high school completion and into the post-secondary years.

The impact of these relationships is measurable.  We are tracking the post-secondary outcomes of over 6,000 high school graduates, and the data shows that iMentor students are 35% more likely to complete high school and 85% more likely to graduate college than their peers who were not in the iMentor program.

Read the full article about iMentor by Max Polaner at Harvard Business School.