Mentoring Opportunities
Updated July 2022
Overview
Through play, role modeling, and nonjudgmental listening, mentors aim to build trusting and supportive relationships with their mentees. These types of relationships encourage mentees to develop social and emotional skills and express challenges that they may be navigating, knowing that they have another supportive figure in their lives to help them along the way. Mentors use this experience to discover the personal rewards of community engagement while learning about local issues, local schools, and interaction with children.
Mentoring Opportunities
The McKeen Center offers several ways to get involved with mentoring through our many Student-Led Service Organizations and in partnership with Big Brothers Big Sisters.
School-based mentoring groups
There are two types of school-based mentoring groups - those with a focus on utilizing age-appropriate recreational activities to facilitate relationship building between mentors and mentees, and those that employ group, activity-based mentoring, with particular curricular foci, such as the empowerment of young women, healthy masculinity, and outdoor leadership.
Applications and training for these groups vary. You can reach out to the student leaders (found in CampusGroups) for more information.
Community-Based Mentoring Groups
These groups meet either on Bowdoin’s campus or in the Brunswick/Bath community. Their approach is play-based and focus on developing the social and emotional skills of mentees through the formation of close mentor-mentee relationships. These groups have group-specific applications and training. More information on specific groups can be found in CampusGroups.
Other Youth-Serving Groups
Bowdoin students work with local children in other ways besides mentoring too. Each of these programs involves a degree of mentorship but they also have other foci (e.g., learning Latin, coding, English language learning) that sets them apart from the more traditional mentoring groups. These groups have group-specific applications and training. You can reach out to the student leaders (found in CampusGroups) for more information.