Mentoring Program

I've researched and found that the National Press Photographers Association has a successful 4 year old mentoring program. You can read about it here. It's absolutely brilliant! I talked to the guy who set it up and was very impressed. Apparently it took some work to set up initially, but has not required much maintenance since then. It's all done through their national website. They have over 90 mentors at the moment.

The way they set it up is the 'mentee' (if that's the word for it) selects the mentor on the website and contacts him on his own. Mentors can have as many mentees as they want. The relationships can be set any number of ways, whatever suits the parties in question best. I researched and found out that people want mentors for different reasons, so it's more effective to allow them to set it up personally. General boundaries can of course be set, as they were stated on the NPPA site.

I have begun talking to ASMP leadership about setting up a mentoring program this way. We'll see how it goes. Hopefully it will be presented at next week's national board meeting.