September 4, 2012

Be a Mentor

This is a video about Mentoring young people and the Dream Mentoring Program. Thanks for WriteClick and Morph Digital Solutions for helping us create this. We love it :)


We hope this will help encourage more volunteers to sign up as mentors and volunteer with projects that work with young people.

Take a look and let us know what you think:-

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=24HqSC9antg


 

The July-Aug Cycle Begins

After a lot of effort to attempt a second cycle in a year, the Dream Mentoring Program started its July-Aug cycle. This allows Dream A Dream to offer mentors for 100 young people in a year across two cycles - July-Aug & Jan-Feb.
 
With the help of Dr. David Pearson and Dr. Fiona Kennedy, we have been able to invest in building a certified training team. We hope this will help us expand the reach of the program to more young people in the future.
 
We now have 32 mentors mentoring this cycle. This includes 26 newly trained volunteer mentors and 6 former volunteers mentors returned to mentoring again this cycle. These volunteer mentors are being matched with young people across 3 different partner centers and begin their mentoring term.





 



 





 
 






 







 

 
 
 

Class of July- Aug 2012

26 volunteers completed their Mentor Training across 4 days in July- Aug 2012. Certified Mentor Trainers from Dream A Dream, Suchetha Bhat and Nilisha Mohapatra led the training. The training was conducted at Mobilty India 's Rehabilitation center in J.P Nagar, Bangalore.
 
The training focused on child development, child psychology and skills practice relevant for mentoring vulnerable young people of the age group 14-18 years. The Mentor Manual authored by Dr. David Pearson and Dr. Fiona Kennedy helped the volunteers immensely through the training.
 
 
 
 
As always, the training sesssions were enriched by questions and debates about working with young people and using  validation, re-inforcements or punishment.




Role plays and case studies were hilarious and offered amazing amount of learning.



"The role play sessions were the most useful ones and also when members shared some experiences or perspectives. Despite being somewhat artificial, most of us tried to understand how to react to those type of situations. I liked the Mentor Manual's simple language, and not trying to cover too much of theory are the best parts", said  Dhinakaran, a participant.