Why don’t more entrepreneurs and professionals access the support of mentors who want to help? It’s not for a lack of wanting the help. A recent Women in Leadership Foundation study found that mentoring is important to 87% of Canadians, but only 19% have one. In 2009 when I set in search of a mentor, it took me five LONG months to find one.
Around the time I was searching for a mentor, I was on eHarmony, looking for a date. It struck me that the “eHarmony of mentoring websites” would be a great way to solve my problem. The primary difference was that dating has a socially well-defined set of expectations – mentorship didn’t.
Two years later I reflected on the difference my mentor had made for me and the challenges I had finding him. In that reflection, I noticed a number of gaps in the process and the need for a more common understanding of what is mentorship. As I looked at starting a business to solve the problem of finding mentors, I realized that the solution wasn’t as simple as creating a product or service. My company would need to contribute to a much broader conversation and movement towards building ecosystems that support mentorship.
Taking on social innovations require, as one of my mentors Patrick Combs likes to say, “the patience of a saint”. In my experience, it’s not a straight forward planning process—and involves a lot of moving parts.
Prior to launching MENTORnetwork as business in 2012, I was actively working in the mentorship space through my volunteer initiatives. I organized a national conference for Young Professionals and Entrepreneurs, delivered a workshop called “How to Find a Mentor”, created a program called Mentor2Lead through JCI Toronto, and blogging on my own experiences of engaging mentors.
This volunteer activity was fueling my passion, but my day job was paying the bills. My two competing priorities stretched me pretty thin. Then, a unique opportunity presented itself to unify my focus. I presented a concept to the Ontario Centres of Excellence for an event to tell the story of entrepreneur mentorship in the province at their Discovery conference. I was prepared for it to be a volunteer labour of love, but was fortunate to land a three-month paid contract to produce “The World’s Largest Business Mentoring Event” .
One door lead to another and this spring, I was able to create a plan to bring my vision of the “eHarmony of mentoring websites” to fruition, with a new platform called MENTORup. We’re creating a collaborative mentor network between small business centres, chambers of commerce and regional innovation centres.
I can now see the seeds of a culture of mentorship being cultivated. Companies, Associations and Schools are making mentorship programs a core pillar of their learning and development program. Business leaders like Richard Branson and Reid Hoffman are talking about the critical role mentors have played for them. Initiatives like the Canadian Mentorship Challenge (www.mentorshipchallenge.ca) are elevating the conversation about what mentorship is and the role it plays in our communities.
My favorite quote from Soren Kierkegaard is, “Life is lived forward, understood looking back”. I can now see how all of the puzzle pieces I created volunteering over the past fourteen years, are creating a complete picture inside my business. Feeling the winds of cultural change helped me take a leap of faith, turning MENTORnetwork into a fulltime business in the summer of 2012—and now there is literally no turning back.
Canadian Youth Business Foundation, now Futureprenuer, was a SEWF 2013 lead partner, supporting the main stage session “From Serving to Service: Developing Social Impact Career Opportunities for Youth.”
Jeremy O’Krafka, Founder, MENTORnetwork, attended SEWF 2013 as a result of a sponsorship by Futureprenuer.
This is part of a series of articles developed by Futureprenuer as part of its ongoing collaboration with the Trico Charitable Foundation.
Futurpreneur Canada has been fuelling the entrepreneurial passions of Canada’s young enterprise for nearly two decades. We are the only national, non-profit organization that provides financing, mentoring and support tools to aspiring business owners aged 18-39. Our internationally recognized mentoring program hand matches young entrepreneurs with a business expert from a network of more than 2,800 volunteer mentors.
More About SEWF
The Trico Charitable Foundation was honoured to host SEWF 2013. It made history in a number of ways – it was a first for Canada and attracted a record number of speakers and attendees (1,000 individuals from more than 30 countries and over 100 speakers from 20 countries) – but we are most proud of the quality of the discussions on Skills Building, Social Finance, Indigenous Social Enterprise, Collaboration, Policy and Research, and Social Innovation.
We would like to thank the following partners for making SEWF 2013 possible:
Organizing Partners:
- Social Enterprise Council of Canada
- MaRS Centre for Impact Investing
- Social Innovation Generation (SiG)
- The Canadian Community Economic Development Network
Lead Sponsors:
- Suncor
- Vancity
- Government of Canada
- Canadian Youth Business Foundation (now Futurepreneur)
- Social Change Rewards
Presenting Partners:
Supporting Partners:
Friends of SEWF:
Media Partners:
Each year SEWF gives a different host country an incredible opportunity to celebrate and nurture its own social enterprise movement. The inaugural SEWF met in Edinburgh, Scotland. Since then it has been to Melbourne, Australia; San Francisco, U.S.A; Johannesburg, Africa; and Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Learn more about SEWF’s history here.
SEWF 2014 will be held in Seoul, Korea from October 12-16. Hosted by the Work Together Foundation, this significant international gathering has an ambitious agenda: “Social Change through Social Enterprise”. Learn more here.