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Mentor Collective has the best partners in Higher Education.
Mentor Collective partners are forward-thinking leaders and innovators committed to increasing access to and delivering the promise of higher education for ALL students.
So it’s no wonder they advocate for the high-impact student success practice of mentorship at pivotal moments in the student journey. Our partners’ collaboration and passion help us deliver on our shared promise of empowering all people to realize their full potential.
We are exceptionally proud to share our 190 partners have formed nearly 245,000 mentoring relationships between students and trained, relevant mentors.
As we enter Mentor Collective’s first Partner Appreciation Week, we want to say “thank you” to our impact-first partner community. In addition, we want to uplift the fantastic work of a few of our partners who manage their mentorship programs daily.
Here is a message from Jackson Boyar, CEO, and Co-Founder, of Mentor Collective.
Introducing Nonzenzele Aldonza
We're excited to present this insightful interview between Alexandria Glaize, Head of Partner Marketing, Mentor Collective, and Nonzenzele Aldonza, Assistant Coordinator - First Generation Programs, California State Polytechnic University, Pomona.
Don’t have time to read the full interview? Use the links in the Table of Contents below to read the highlights you care about.
Table of Contents
Collaboration Between Divisions
Institutionalizing The Culture of Mentorship
Building Community and Celebrating Mentors
Why Mentorship? Why Mentor Collective?
We’re pleased to highlight Nonzenzele Aldonza, Assistant Coordinator - First Generation Programs, California State Polytechnic University, Pomona as an honoree for Mentor Collective’s Partner Appreciation Week.
As Assistant Coordinator, Nonzenzele plays a crucial role in directing the management of the Bronco Navigators Mentorship program, including coordination of workshops, mentor/mentee matches, engagement opportunities, and student updates.
About Bronco Navigators, the California State Polytechnic University, Pomona's Peer Mentoring Program
Bronco Navigators is a first-year experience peer-to-peer mentorship program through Mentor Collective that uses a highly responsive platform to design, manage, and analyze large-scale mentorship programs. California State Polytechnic University, Pomona designed their program with their Mentor Collective mentorship team to focus on supporting incoming undergraduate students that often miss getting captured by the school’s smaller affinity mentorship programs and summer success programs.
Through manageable and effective surveys, lower-division students were matched with upper-division peers that shared experiences or identities important to the mentee. Volunteer student mentors additionally received training and resources from both Mentor Collective and California State Polytechnic University, Pomona to ensure they felt prepared and comfortable with the role’s responsibilities and platform’s features.
Home Away From Home
Alexandria:What challenges are your students facing? And what interested you in investing in large-scale mentorship to meet those challenges and support first-year first-time students?
Nonzenzele: During the pandemic, the campus was shut down, and we saw that students were still enrolled in school, they were still full-time students, but their engagement from them was very low.
Students needed a space to connect and find that sense of community they were missing with online learning. So we started building our program out of that need expressed by our students.
We launched our Bronco Navigators program with Mentor Collective because students were looking for that sense of belonging and connection. Even though we’re still amid the pandemic, our campus is back in person. And so we’re noticing that the needs and demands we initially had going into this program are now shifting because we’re back on campus.
Collaboration Between Divisions
Alexandria: The Bronco Navigators program is owned and supported by Academic and Student Affairs. How do you identify potential collaborators across campus to support your mentoring program, and how does that align with whole-institution planning?
Nonzenzele: Retention and persistence aren’t just Academic Affairs’ job, so Student Affairs and Academic Affairs at CPP run the Bronco Navigators program together.
We didn’t bring our money together; we got our ideas to collaborate and determine if large-scale mentorship was the right solution and Mentor Collective was the right partner. Leaders did the “pre-work” needed to get buy-in from other divisions by having thoughtful conversations about concerns and shared visions.
The collaboration between academic and student affairs has been phenomenal and a model for supporting students fully. Coordinating between divisions allows us to address student needs quickie and direct appropriate campus resources. In addition, the success of our collaboration has led to the launch of another initiative targeting first gen parents, families, and supporters.
Alexandria: Your approach has shifted slightly now that students are back on campus. How are you defining success, and how has that shifted? What metrics matter most?
Nonzenzele: I measure success by reading through the insight flags to see student engagement and how often they communicate.
If you look at the numbers from last year compared to this year, we did not reach the same # of mentoring pairs. Last year we had 2,200 students participate in our program, whereas we're at about 1,200 students this year. That’s a huge gap between last year and now. We were beating ourselves up in the beginning. We asked ourselves, “What can we do?” We panicked because we didn’t reach out earlier or didn’t do this.
As a collective group, we initially didn’t think the program was successful due to the number of mentorships formed. However, after looking at the data with the team, I would respond that we were just as successful this year as last year. I might even go so far as to say that, because of the student usage of flags, we were more successful this year than last.
I always refer back to flags because they’re the best thing ever! They give us a quick glimpse of what’s happening in students’ lives. It’s not super detailed, but that’s what I like about it: I’m not reading paragraph after paragraph. Instead, I can get a quick glimpse and recognize what resources we have and how to use them to help our students. From what I see in the flags, our student's general concerns are not only academic but surround mental health and coming out of the closet.
Students now know how to navigate and utilize the program since it’s been around for two years. And even our students that have been around, this is their first time, our first-year or incoming transfer student. So we had many returning mentors who were more comfortable with the platform and could better guide their mentees on getting the most out of it.
Institutionalizing The Culture of Mentorship
Nonzenzele: Our program is excellent at institutionalizing ourselves in terms of building intentional collaborations with campus partners that we know will support us in the long term. Those partnerships agree with the program’s mission and are aligned with our values, which allows for increasing campus collaboration.
We’re conversing with the Dean of New Student Programs about potentially having the mentorship program as part of the onboarding process for newly enrolled students. New and transfer students would be required to sign up for Bronco Navigators, whether or not they decide to utilize it. That way, they know that, no matter what, they can use the program to get the support they need through staff and mentors.
Another campus partner that we collaborated with has been the Institutional Research Department. They help us look at the data and reports to assess this year’s impact compared to our first year. Under our Department of Academic Support and Learning Services, we partner with RAMP, a Reading, Advising, and Mentorship Program that services low-income, first-generation, and disabled students.
Alexandria: How have the insights gained through your mentorship program affected your ability to collaborate and coordinate student success interventions across campus from that institutional point of view?
Nonzenzele: My day-to-day of what it looks like within Bronco Navigators is: checking insight flags, looking at our engagement, gathering any data that our partners or we need, and providing information to the department and campus partners as needed. Campus partnerships are key.
To increase campus collaboration, we are integrating student insights and flags from the partner dashboard to other systems so that all campus partners know the concerns and students can get the support they need.
We are still working on embedding insight flags into the campus EAB (formerly known as the Education Advisory Board) portal, so that other campus partners can access the same information we have. So we’re planning on granting access to priority insight flags to anyone who has access to Mentor Collective or CPP Connect to make notes on student portals. So through CPP Connect, our team can make notes on a student's profile. For example, we could say, “XYZ, this was going on,” which would notify the academic advisors or any other programs on campus that have access to this student's information.
We’re very intentional about the student population. This program was intended for underrepresented, first-generation, or Pell Grant-eligible students. We wanted to help and support a specific niche of students. Everybody needs a mentor, everybody needs a mentee, and everybody needs resources.
This year, we have to figure out our next goals for the program. Will we open it up to the campus? Are we going to narrow it back down to the intended audience?
Building Community and Celebrating Mentors
Alexandria: What are some of the unique things you’re doing to build a community that impacts mentor and mentee engagement?
Nonzenzele: The two biggest ones that come to mind are our spring Mentor Recognition Celebration and our mentor appreciation newsletter. We have two distinct mentor and mentee newsletters, which are intentionally separate so we can tailor the information for the given audience.
Nonzenzele: This past Spring, we saw a significant increase in the flags and insights and could only imagine what our mentors were going through. So, to show our appreciation and support, we hosted a Mentor Recognition Celebration - we wanted to tell them, “hey, we see you, we value you, and you’re appreciated.”
We were very intentional about the celebration. We had the Vice President come out and personally thank the students for their service in the program. Having a higher-level administrator, especially the VP, is a huge deal for many students. Many of them were excited, like, “Woah,” and you know, “oo, ahh.” We had about 50 students attend. Also, our mentors now have the opportunity to put their time as Broncos Navigatormentor on their co-curricular transcripts, which they can download at the end of the year.
Nonzenzele: The second way we uplifted our students was through our Mentor Appreciation newsletter. Mentors sometimes forget to take time for themselves and remember that they’re students too. It’s easy for them to get wrapped up in dishing out information to their mentee and forget that they can also take it in: they’re just as eligible for these programs and resources as their mentees.
Why Mentorship? Why Mentor Collective?
Alexandria: Why do you Champion mentorship?
Nonzenzele: I champion mentorship because there’s a genuine need for mentorship. Mentorship has helped me personally navigate and become successful in whatever project I may be handling. I think I will always speak specifically to this mentorship program in the peer mentorship piece because it comes in many forms.
Alexandria: What excites you about working with Mentor Collective?
Nonzenzele: Honestly, it makes our lives easier. Your partnerships help us be visionaries in the way we want to. For example, I like leveraging MC to help with data management since I need help navigating that. As well as having the opportunity to meet other Mentor Collective partners - a lot of our ideas come from collaborating with other institutions. We share ideas because we all have the same general mission and vision. That’s what excited me about MC. I’m a stan. I rant and rave about you all the time. I’m a stan.
Don't miss our other partner highlights, including Darren Ward from the University of Wisconsin-Stout, Tiffani Williams from Tuskegee University, and Brianne Neptin from the University of Rhode Island.