My experience as an online volunteer blog mentor - February 2006

In addition to researching and compiling information online mentoring (the most comprehensive information on such, in fact), and helping to create numerous online mentor programs, including this one for an Austin, Texas elementary school, I have also had the pleasure of serving as an online volunteer mentor on three different occassions, all with young people.

Most recently, I was an online volunteer blog mentor for the Young Caucasus Women Project. Recruited from current Future Leaders Exchange (FLEX) Program students, young women from Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia currently living in the USA are being trained in citizen journalism, and part of the training includes learning to publish their own blogs. Once they learned the basics of blogging, then the student's own blogging bagan. Now, at the start of the week, an online volunteer mentor posts a suggestion for the week's blog topic, and each student posts a blog of her own on that topic, as well as comments on each other's blogs. The students may post on other topics throughout the week as well. This continues until the student leaves the USA. After the students return to their home countries, they will receive a monthly blog assignment, but they may post to their blogs as often as they like. The volunteer mentors are experienced adult bloggers from around the world, with a particular focus on bloggers from developing countries who are having an impact on the dissemination of news from their countries.

The purpose of this Project is to:

• highlight the similarities and learn about the differences between young women in these neighboring countries.

• promote citizen journalism in developing countries as an alternative to mainstream media.

• promote blogs as a method of democratic expression.

• expose young women to journalism and technology.

Mentor's suggested topics that students have been asked to write blogs on include:

• Volunteerism: just unpaid labor or a tool for empowerment? (yes, that was mine)

• Strengths and Virtues: what are your strengths of character? What would it be like to make the cultivation and employment of your character strengths a significant part of your life?

• Responsibility: What are your responsibilities right now and how do you feel about them?

• Friendship from a Distance

I can't speak to how well the program will meet its stated goals -- that's for someone else to measure and report on. But I can speak to what it's been like to be an online mentor. In this most recent experience, from my point of view, what's been important to remember as a volunteer for this project is:

• that these students are not native English speakers, and are often self-conscious about expressing themselves in writing in this language that is not their own

• that volunteer mentors and students will never meet face-to-face, so volunteer mentors need to maintain a very positive, upbeat approach in their written communications, so that students feel warmly supported by them

• that volunteer mentors are adults, and need to be careful not to talk "over the heads" of these students, all of whom are teens, or to write something that sounds overly critical or sounds in any way insulting

• that these students come from areas with very different values, very different standards of living and very different beliefs than those of "the West."

• that misunderstandings are bound to happen; you work to avoid them, but when they happen, you work to mend and hurt feelings.

If you are interested in creating an online mentoring program, for young people or adults, see the Virtual Volunteering Project's information online mentoring -- still the most comprehensive information available.

 
Return to my volunteer-related resources

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