The Corporation is delighted to join with the Harvard Mentoring Project and MENTOR to spearhead National Mentoring Month (NMM) in January 2007.

NMM is really a campaign to recruit more mentors who can help youth from disadvantaged backgrounds achieve their potential. The national service family is already highly invested in mentoring as a powerful strategy for helping young people succeed, with virtually all of our programs supporting a broad variety of mentoring initiatives. The Corporation’s Strategic Plan includes a goal that America should support 3 million additional mentoring relationships by 2010.

The National Mentoring Month campaign will showcase snazzy public service ads, featuring Maya Angelou, Quincy Jones, Clint Eastwood, and Sting on television and in newspapers. Other PSAs will highlight the need for mentors for young people aging out of foster care and youth with disabilities. The theme of the 2007 National Mentoring Month is “Pass It On. Mentor a Child.”

One of the reasons that NMM is such a natural for national service is that the campaign works through state and local nonprofit organizations and government agencies. Some of our state service commissions and grantees have led National Mentoring Month efforts in the past, and I hope more will get involved. Another interesting connection between National Mentoring Month and national service is some overlap in target populations: college students, people of faith, full-time workers and current volunteers make the most promising prospects for new mentors. One step all national service programs can take is to send out the mentor recruitment e-postcard that we will send you in the first week of January to all the people you’d like to see get involved in mentoring.

National Mentoring Month can also provide an excellent platform for your Martin Luther King Jr. Day of Service efforts. You can use King Day to honor mentors in your community, recruit new mentors, or provide training. Other ideas include encouraging mentor pairs serve together on King Day, or using your King Day activities to promote National Mentoring Month.

We hope you will join us in starting 2007 by not only raising the visibility of mentoring in your community but by helping increase the number of mentors for children who need them. There’s more information about National Mentoring Month at both www.whomentoredyou.org and www.mentoring.org. If you have questions or need help with ideas, please e-mail or contact Theresa Clower on my staff at tclower@cns.gov or at 202-606-6755.

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