Series - The Mentorship Movement

Youth don’t know how to find services — especially mentorship — online. We have a solution.

Author Stacey Dakin
MENTOR Canada, in partnership with Find Help/211, United Way Centraide Canada, Magnet, and the Government of Canada’s Youth Employment and Skills Strategy, is developing a tool to make finding supports much easier for young people — and there’s much other sectors could learn from it, too.

Why It Matters

Young people who are mentored are 53 percent more likely to report good mental health, and more than twice as likely to report a strong sense of belonging in their community. But a majority of young people surveyed by MENTOR Canada said they didn’t know how to find a mentor online.

This story is in partnership with MENTOR Canada. 

Young people can find almost anything they need online — except mentorship. 

That’s what youth participants interviewed for our 2020 Mapping the Mentoring Gap research initiative told us.

“I think there is a big need for a portal that people can access to find a mentor, because I feel it’s very hard to find a mentor nowadays. So, I think it’s important to have a system or like a central hub where people can go so that they can find their needs and stuff,” one young person said. “One big problem for programs is a lack of visibility. It took me days to find [a mentoring] program and it was almost hidden on some website,” said another.

This feedback left us at MENTOR Canad

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