Student Beans is delighted to announce our partnership with One Million Mentors. Find out more about what this partnership means to us – and how we’ll be empowering young people to take their first steps into working life.
“Everyone tells you that you have to aim for something, you aim to get into university and then you aim to get a job”, says Shuab Hussein Gamote, a former mentee with One Million Mentors. But it’s the bit in-between that’s the confusing part. If you don’t have someone directly there it’s a bit like walking through a dark room. I suppose the mentoring scheme is giving a bit of light.”
Shuab’s experience is one that is shared by so many students, particularly if you come from a more disadvantaged background. At Student Beans, we know that young people are facing some of the biggest challenges and worst economic prospects for generations. That’s why we’re delighted to have formed a partnership with One Million Mentors, a leading mentoring organisation.
Last week, The Prince’s Trust published their Youth Index 2022. The results indicated that young people’s confidence and overall happiness have hit their lowest points in the thirteen-year history of the survey.
They found that these effects are even worse for students and young people from the most disadvantaged backgrounds- for those not in work, education or training, or from poorer backgrounds, a quarter of young people report that they always feel anxious compared to 15% of peers in work or education and 16% of young people overall.
Seeing how young people are feeling is what inspired the Student Beans partnership with One Million Mentors, helping to bring the benefits of mentoring to more young people and students. We will work together to ensure young people don’t get left behind and are equipped with the skills and confidence to reach their potential. We have a way to go -many students are unaware of the benefits of mentoring, lack knowledge of how to find a suitable mentor, or even feel some stigma with mentoring to believe it’s not for them – but we are confident that we can help to make a difference.
One Million Mentors have a simple model- “One-to-one, one hour a month, one life changed” – and they’ve demonstrated some incredible results. The two main benefits that their mentees experience are confidence building and general career advice and guidance. After mentoring, 78% of their mentees said they felt positive about the future (up from 56% pre-mentoring), and 81% (up from 33%!) now know how to get the experience and training they need for jobs, education, or both.
Student Beans and One Million Mentors will be working together in three main ways:
- Our employees will begin mentoring young people through One Million Mentors -we’re aiming to contribute more than 1000 mentoring hours over the next year.
- We’ll use our voice with students to promote the benefits of mentoring and aim to work with One Million Mentors to sign up hundreds of new mentees, all working to improve their skills and confidence.
- We will bring the benefits of mentoring to the businesses we work with and grow the momentum throughout our network.
To find out more about how Student Beans is supporting students through our social impact programme visit our social impact site. To learn more about One Million Mentors, please visit the One Million Mentors website.