Mentorship Programme

All Hands and Hearts is running a mentorship programme. They have done a few batches of this in the past and are doing another session this year. I saw the invitation for this and thought it sounded brilliant, in particular they are doing a track for late career changes. This is probably me if I want to change my career (assuming I currently have one) to working in international development, which I think I do. So I decided I was going to sign up to be a mentee.

I mentioned on project to a few people that I was planning to sign up for the mentorship scheme and three different people asked if I was signing up to be a mentor. It actually didn’t initially occur to me to do that. Partly because despite the fact that I’m nearly 50 (I keep checking my passport and doing the maths, apparently this is actually true), I really only think of myself as being in my early 30s. I’m far too young and inexperienced to mentor anyone (especially in an All Hands and Hearts context where I really don’t have much experience). However, of course, I really do have a lot of interesting experience and advice that others might benefit from.

So I applied for both and emailed the coordinator to tell them that I had applied for both and that she could remove me from one or the other if she thought that was appropriate.

I have been accepted as both a mentor and a mentee. The process of matching mentors with mentees is ongoing as I’m writing this. So I’m looking forward to taking part in both parts of this process. I think it’ll be really interesting to do both at once and I’m really looking forward to both roles.

I’ll keep you all posted as to how it all goes.