Mentorship in the social impact world has a diversity problem, say new founders

For any founder, having a mentor is a key factor in success: someone who provides expert feedback, critical advice, a larger network, and connections to funding opportunities. This holds just as true for social impact founders — the ones pushing to create a better world. 

90 percent of startups fail, and that includes social enterprises. But for founders who had mentors? That five-year survival rate can bump up to 70 percent.

There’s a clear need for mentorship. Despite this, when Future of Good asked the members of our 21 New Founders to Watch list if they thought there were enough mentorship opportunities for founders of social impact organizations, the majority answered ‘no.’ Responses came from founders supporting varied causes, from youth homelessness to home healthcare providers to early childhood educators. Despite the different focus areas, founders voiced similar mentorship challenges. 

The sector needs more mentors in order to generate more impact

Based in British Columbia, Nada El Masry co-designed RADIUS Refugee Livelihood Lab alongside colleague Camille Dumond. The Refugee Livelihood Lab provides mentorship opportunities to refugees and immigrants, developing leadership capacity through training and helping to get projects off the ground.

Born in Libya, El Masry is Palestinian, and “grew up as a stateless refugee for many, many years,” she says. 

El-Masry’s family entered Canada as immigrants, where she faced social isolation and racism. She found support and mentorship in B.C.’s muslim community. “They took the time to support me, whether it was reviewing a school application, helping me understand the system, or even teaching me how to take the bus,” El Masry says. “They really helped me understand that my experience with Islamophobia and racism were not isolated incidents — that this is something that the community faces. My sense of activism in Canada started there.”

That activism is what inspired El Masry to co-design the Refugee Livelihood Lab. She says that at the Lab, the projects brought to reality are the ones supported by mentors. “It doesn’t mean that these were the most amazing or creative ideas,” she says. “They just happened to have mentors and advisors that made the connection and supported them.” 

According to 2020 studies, less than 1 percent of Canadian corporate leaders are Black, while individuals with “foreign-sounding names” are 20 to 40 percent less likely to get a call-back for a job interview. When such basic barriers exist to business success, it becomes even harder for marginalized communities to access mentors at the top of their industries.

This becomes especially true for racialized newcomers. “We need more places where connections are made between racialized migrants, their ideas and people in the [relevant] sectors who could help amplify and provide mentorship to those projects,” El Masry says. When she first came to Canada, El Masry found this type of mentorship for herself with Fresh Voices, a non-profit led by immigrant and refugee youth, working to improve policies that affect the sense of belonging for racialized immigrants and refugee youth. “Even though I joined as an adult ally, I learned so much from that group,” says El Masry, pointing to the group’s capacity to collaborate and organize around social issues. “In many ways, the work that I do today is based on the learning that I had there.”

Fresh Voices tackles barriers to success and provides mentorship connections for everything from navigating immigration paperwork to learning English to managing mental health. “A lot of the time, many of us don’t even know what the barriers are, or we blame ourselves for them,” El Masry explains. “Everyone says you should be grateful for Canada. It makes it hard for us to say, ‘Yes it is great, and we also face ABC [issues]’.” 

“I was the only Black student — woman — who was interested in policy practice, and what that meant for racialized social workers.”

For El-Masry, B.C.’s Muslim community and Fresh voices “really helped me develop my own understanding and analysis of the Canadian system. In my low moments, they were there. They introduced me to other people. A lot of the jobs that I found were partly because of those connections. They were instrumental, and they continue to be.”

In Toronto, founder Candies Kotchapaw works to provide similar support networks for Black youth through her organization, Developing Young Leaders of Tomorrow, Today (DYLOTT). A leadership incubator, DYLOTT’s mission is to support the career trajectories of Black youth, with programs covering everything from literacy and public speaking to an introduction to Model United Nations, access to mentors in STEM, law, public affairs and more.

Today, Kotchapaw holds her MA and BA in Social Work from York University. However, it wasn’t an easy journey — when completing her MA, Kotchapaw experienced social isolation, financial barriers, and a lack of mentorship. “I was the only Black student — woman — who was interested in policy practice, and what that meant for racialized social workers,” Kotchapaw says. 

One faculty member, Luann Good Gingrich, invested time to support Kotchapaw. “She couldn’t identify with me personally because she was not a Black woman, but Luann used her network to really show me where I could go for information,” says Kotchapaw. 

In Canada, a study shows that while 94 percent of Black youth said they’d like to get a higher education, only 60 percent thought they could. Kotchapaw has said that facing systemic barriers without mentorship in her own academic career, she had a sense that ‘striving for the greater was pointless’. By supporting kids as young as six through DYLOTT, Kotchapaw is working to ensure Black youth have access to mentorship as early as possible.

A need for mentorship through the funding process

Kotchapaw sees a huge benefit in matching founders with mentors during the funding process, in particular. “Grant writing is an art,” she says. “If you’re doing grant writing, you’re a startup, a young founder or somebody just entering the social impact space. You don’t have the network to tell you what you should include in your application, what you should do when you’re courting funders.”

When securing funding for DYLOTT, Kotchapaw did not have mentors. While the funding organization she and her team applied to had a built-in support system, “the major challenge for me at that time was understanding how to write a grant application that represented what I was doing,” Kotchapaw says. “Having a mentor who understood how to best capture the work and put it into grant writing language would have been very helpful.”

Kotchapaw continues, “I was developing programs based on lived experiences of marginalization, then experiencing marginalization through the grant application process because I did not have the mentorship resources available to me that would ensure a successful outcome.”

Kotchapaw adds that having a mentor is vital for reminding founders not to give up if they don’t receive a round of funding. “Oftentimes it’s not because your idea isn’t good. We’ve experienced it many times — the strategic direction of the funder changes, and that leaves you in the lurch. It’s important for that mentoring relationship to guide those startups to say, ‘If this doesn’t work out, we can link you to other opportunities’.”

For Kotchapaw, it’s clear that funders should fill this mentorship gap, and “take an active role in supporting founders through the funding process. When funders are directly involved with founders throughout the process, I think there is more of a commitment on both sides in seeing the work succeed.”

A need for more representative mentors 

Rusul Alrubail is the Executive Director of Toronto-based Parkdale Centre for Innovation, a non-profit incubator and accelerator committed to making entrepreneurial and professional skills accessible, focusing on diverse founders, people of colour, newcomers and those from low-income backgrounds. 

“Mentorship plays a crucial role in the growth and development of entrepreneurs and startups, especially those who are working in the social impact sector,” says Alrubail. “The social impact sector can be a challenging industry to navigate, because of the labour that one needs to do in order to break through a lot of societal, financial, and racial barriers. Having a mentor that is able to provide guidance and support, and especially one who’s been through it all, can help a social entrepreneur to navigate those challenges and let them know they’re not working in isolation.”

For Alrubail, it was difficult to find great mentors. “A lot of the people who I thought were mentors end up putting my work and ideas down, and had the very negative mindset that I wouldn’t make it,” she says. “It’s one of the key elements we are actively working against at Parkdale Centre. We need folks who believe in our entrepreneurs and champion them.”

Instead of mentors, Alrubail says she had “advocates and champions, and a great partner who has lended his expertise, time and commitment to supporting my mission. Those individuals provided time when needed the most to give advice, direction, and point me to opportunities I might have missed otherwise.”

When it comes to social impact mentors, Alrubail says the space has been heavily focused on CleanTech for the last 10 years, an industry that is majority white, and is now shifting towards climate justice, housing, food security and equitable leadership. “As a result, the individuals who are in a position to mentor are majority white and do not represent the current landscape of new entrepreneurs in social impact spaces,” Alrubail says. “When you look at those who are just emerging in the social impact space, you will see the majority are racialized, likely youth working to make a difference. I think there’s an opportunity to be each other’s mentors, to create our own ecosystem of support.”

In selecting partnerships and mentors, the DYLOTT team is very intentional. “Representative mentors can share a common understanding of the plight of struggle to achieve and maintain success,” Kotchapaw says. “This is critically important for Black youth, especially because the stereotypical narrative is that they lack direction and may not have the work ethic to excel. Having access to successful mentors disrupts and counteracts this negative narrative, while building resiliency in young people.”

“I think there’s a big responsibility on investors, funders, governments on all levels to provide support systems for social entrepreneurs.”

Kotchapaw says she and her team spend countless meetings on this. “We want to make sure that everything that we’re putting out is reflective of our life experiences, and is a true and visible representation of the excellence within Black communities.” 

Social impact organizations like DYLOTT, the Refugee Livelihood Lab, and Parkdale Centre for Innovation are creating mentorship opportunities for social impact founders across Canada. 

Alrubail says, “I think there’s a big responsibility on investors, funders, governments on all levels to provide support systems for social entrepreneurs. At the end of the day, entrepreneurs are their own advocates as well, so to ensure their own success they’ll need to find networks of support.”

Her advice for social impact founders? “Make sure to find advocates and hang on to them. Build relationships with people that you know want the best for you and your mission. And make sure you nurture those relationships — like anything, they take time to develop.”

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