Mentorship is the best vehicle for sustainable change
“The SAYes mentorship programme will make you a better mentor, coach, manager, and frankly speaking, person.”
The best way to learn is to teach. When people mentor, they become better at their jobs, and more fulfilled in their personal lives.
We assess 10 components of inclusive leadership skills and personal qualities. Consistently high scoring components across partner programmes include:
‘envisioning futures & motivating others to act strategically’ • ‘appreciation and respect for different perspectives and backgrounds’ • ‘coping with uncertainty’.
“70% of employees say that their sense of purpose
is defined by their work”.
– McKinsey & Company, 2021
“I feel I am a better manager, more present, aware, and able to ask the right questions. In my personal life, I became someone that listens more and keeps an open mind, without judgement and trying always to understand the other person’s point of view.”
Attract, retain and empower top-tier talent through virtual volunteering.
We assess 11 components of employee engagement. Consistently high scoring components across partner programmes include:
‘I felt proud of my company’ • ‘I felt a meaningful investment in my career growth.’ • ‘I felt an investment in my development as a whole person’ • ‘I felt a strong vision and purpose alignment’.
“Dissatisfaction with employee-development efforts appears to fuel many early exits”.
Harvard Business Review, 2012
The leading reasons for talent turnover most regularly cited are sub-par growth opportunities, lack of visibility and access to career opportunities (including those outside of their immediate region or function), or simply “I feel like I can’t develop my career here anymore”. Combined with a wave of ‘purpose and work/life resignations’ the urgency to launch impactful employee engagement initiatives is more pressing than ever before.
Employees want to connect with each other and with their communities in personally and professionally meaningful ways. This insight is relevant to talent retention, to recruitment and to the onboarding of new hires – as well as core business. Distributed and remote ways of working alongside gig economy dynamics increasingly present a case for ensuring that employees are able to access and realise as many adjacent opportunities as possible. Isolation within functional or regional silos is not only demotivating it also gets in the way of creative collaboration and connection through the ‘adjacently possible’. The costs to company innovation and culture are severe, and increasingly foreground questions around what counts as internally as well as externally inclusive communities.
Employee volunteerism can be a huge part of effective and inclusive engagement, especially when combined with opportunities for building skills, visibility and access. Recognition and feedback across levels and teams is especially valuable in empowering employees to take ownership of their own personal and professional growth – an important factor in future-proofing any workforce. Yet all too often, volunteer initiatives appear superficial, tokenistic and disconnected from the company ecosystem. This is unfortunate because virtual volunteering, and e-mentoring especially, can provide almost frictionless, yet hugely impactful personal and professional growth to employees, while at the same time reaching into under-served communities across the globe. Mentoring is a largely unrealised opportunity for social change as well as for employee engagement. We firmly believe e-mentoring can be harnessed for social change at scale, while also providing organisations with the meaningful growth opportunities that they want for their teams.
SAYes offers Partner Programmes to corporates, linking transition programming – through virtual volunteering/e-mentoring – to social and community impact initiatives that your company wishes to support. Various levels of programme customisation are available, depending on the recruitment (versus nomination) and training of beneficiary (mentee) groups, the programme design and programme support requested.
We have built partner programmes with corporate teams from around the world and amazing groups of young people (aged between 14 and 32 years) in the UK and South Africa. We have extensive experience with care-experienced young people, refugees and asylum seekers, LGBTQI+ youth, first-time job seekers, interns, sport for development coaches, youth in conflict with the law, teenage parents, youth-headed households, youth in foster care, high school students, students on scholarships, university students, youth change-makers, youth with mental health challenges, and youth with special needs and disabilities.
“I am forever grateful and thankful for this life changing journey. This is by far one of my best and most valuable life experiences thus far. Everyone should experience this if they want to impart benevolence in the world”
Mentorships change the world.
Improve your CSR/CSI (Corporate Social Responsibility) initiatives through custom mentorship programmes.
of mentors positively changed their perspective on sustainable and effective community engagement.
of mentors reported deepening their perspective on diversity, equity and inclusion
“Cringeworthy emails to your team about corporate social responsibility efforts that seem disconnected from the team’s day-to-day experience will only inspire cynicism.” – McKinsey & Company, 2021
SAYes is committed to bringing the best social change experience to business teams across the globe, and to helping corporate partners improve the impact of their social change investments, tractably, sustainably and at scale. Our Partner Programmes connect your business teams with young people through mentorship, and are built to deliver the skills, values and vision of purpose leadership, while also achieving powerful employee engagement with social and community impact benefits.
If you’d like to signpost SAYes mentorship to young people who may be eligible, please download and circulate the flyer pack below.
SAYes monitors programme rollout extensively, gathering weekly data on number of mentoring sessions, contact hours and challenges. We report quantitatively on this data at 3-month intervals, and provide additional qualitative analysis of meeting challenges and Individual Transition Plan content aggregated by domain. We also request programme ratings and reviews from participating youth partners.
SAYes evaluates programme impact both qualitatively and quantitively, providing a consolidated impact report at project completion. For all programmes we examine quantifiable changes in mentee decision-making and behaviour and the impact thereof on independence and well-being.
Additional impact evaluations are available for programmes that introduce novel programme content.
of mentees reported having a mentor positively affected their life.
The Nike POWERUP e-Mentoring Programme connects Nike staff from across EMEA, with sport for development partners, and youth sport changemakers.
The AP e-Mentorship programme aims to improve life outcomes of the mentees, as well as providing inclusive leadership and mentorship skills to the AP Partner Staff. The programme aims to develop resilience, accountability, self-efficacy, and leadership potential.
The Waves for Change e-Mentoring Programme connects independent volunteer mentors from around the world with young surf therapy coaches interning at Waves for Change.
The LSEG (London Stock Exchange Group) partnership links staff from across EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa) with young people in South Africa and the UK.
SAYes provides post programme support across all our programmes – for mentees via youth-led alumni groups as well as ongoing access to Transition Specialist and Mentee Liaison support. We also offer alumni access to various paid functions within SAYes, including ambassador and advisory roles.
Our network of Alumni in the UK and SA regularly hold online and in-person events, including inviting speakers from around the globe to engage on matters of interest and shared experience (e.g. Making Connection events for care-experienced young people).
Most change interventions fail because they fail to consider how powerfully social human beings are.
This insight is the foundation of SAYes mentorship approach: the best way to create lasting change is through relationships. When high value social connections are structured and supported, they profoundly accelerate the acquisition of skills, values and knowledge in any area of life. We understand the nature of this structure and support, and have used our knowledge to develop and support mentorship programmes that have deeply improved life outcomes for thousands of people since 2008.
SAYes Mentoring is part of a new vision for philanthropy, a growing global community committed to generosity at scale. We are inspiring businesses, governments, and individuals to make social change investments that matter. This allows us to offer world-class mentorships regardless of chance differences in background, geography or circumstance.
