60:1:10 – Journal of a Mosaic Mentor – Should I be a mentor?

This journal is a collection of my experiences as a Mosaic Mentor to 10 amazing girls at Ark Franklin Primary School from April 2015 to July 2015.

The title 60:1:10 stands for 60 minutes: 1ce a week: for 10 weeks which symbolises the structure of the primary school mentoring programme where we mentored girls for 1 hour every Thursday for 10 weeks.

This has been a remarkable experience and the start of a new passion; it is amazing how 1 hour a week can absolutely change your life!

Chapter 1: Should I be a mentor?

The decision to become a mentor I am sad to say came from a selfish place (as I am sure most of these things do). I am a young, extremely ambitious person, I do not like to be idle and I am always looking for the next experience to be had and the next thing I can do to improve myself.

Another important thing to know is that I LOVE to plan anything including my life.

I was on LinkedIn looking at profiles of professionals I wanted to be like to see what I had to do to get my career to that level (as you do). I quickly noticed that all these people had a few things in common; qualifications, minimum years practical experience, continuous personal/professional development AND voluntary work!

Light bulb moment! I need to get some voluntary experience and quick; but what??

I cast my mind back to times when I mentored class mates in high school and university and all the times my parents, teachers and friends told me I would make a great teacher.

Bingo I will volunteer as a mentor.

My next step was to type ‘mentoring young people in London’ into google and we all know what happened next! That’s right I applied for EVERY SINGLE ONE even though they had different values, specialised in different risk levels (early prevention, rehabilitation etc.) and focused on different groups in the community.

After hearing nothing back for a week or so I decided to be more targeted in my search and choose a group that I cared about (young BAME girls). Thus Mosaic appeared on my computer screen and the rest (as they say) is history!

Mosaic is grateful to the support of Criterion Capital and the Players of the People’s Postcode Lottery, without whom the Mosaic Primary School Programme wouldn’t be possible.