Team Australia Mentor Project Launch

There has been some good interest in the Mentoring Project I suggested for Team Australia earlier this week so we’re going to go ahead with it. You never know if these things are going to work until you give it a try, so we will start small and informal to see if it gets any traction.

My main concern is that those kind souls who volunteer to be Mentors might get overwhelmed with needy newbies who want extra help. Experienced Steemians all know what the Follow-For-Follow crowd can be like and when it comes to charitable activities, there is ALWAYS someone with their hand out. So I think we should take it slow and just focus on the new members to Team Australia from this point onward.

The way we’ll start off is this - Once Hive account@choogirl has made her post announcing the new recruits, I’ll put a comment on her post calling for Mentors. If those interested Mentors can reply to that comment and nominate both a new member from the post to mentor AND some common interest that they share with the new member, I’ll update my comment with a register of who is buddying up with who and what those common interests are. The point of the register is to make sure we’re not doubling up our Mentors while other new members might be missing out.

I know that some Mentors will be extra-enthused by this idea and will want to jump right in, but I think each mentor should only choose 1 new member from the recruitment post. I’d expect at the start there might not be enough Mentors to go around for all the new members – and that’s OK. We have to keep in mind that there is a big influx of new members every week now, so even if Mentors are only picking up 1 Mentee every week, that is still a LOT!

Just to remind everyone what is involved, it is very informal but we would like Mentors to commit to supporting Mentees as follows :-

1. Add them to your Following list
2. Commit to Vote for their posts
3. Comment on their posts to foster some engagement
4. Be there to provide some advice (if it’s wanted)

Of course there are plenty of other ways that Mentors could help new members so feel free to go beyond this, but Mentors should not feel pressure or obligation to go beyond the basics. Mentors are here to help but they're not servants and should always feel free to say "No" to Mentee requests without any guilt or shame.