The Heart of Mentoring:
Mentoring is about giving another person unconditional positive regard and guiding them in learning how to channel their strengths into practical hope. A significant finding from prosocial behavior research is that some people have a potential community building drive within them that becomes active through mentoring. Some people may never become the community builder that they could become unless they have the opportunity to mentor and take it. Some people are born with community building dispositions that are so strong that they do not need the catalyst of mentoring for them to become active. Some people may mentor and love it and be good at it and never become community builders because they may not have community building dispositions at all.
The Connective Collective:
The Connective Collective is a support group for community building and strengths-centric community serving leaders. Interested members of the Connective Collective will have the opportunity to mentor emerging community builders. We are proposing to introduce emerging community builders to existing community builders/leaders through one-to-one coffees and that mentor/mentee and peer mentor relationships will emerge organically.
The Lincoln Youth Mentoring Expansion Project Idea:
Pershing Pals is a mentoring program that pairs high school juniors and seniors from Northeast High School with a fourth grade student at Pershing Elementary. They all meet in the cafeteria during 7th period once a month. The schools are about half a mile apart. The distance is similar to that between Lincoln High and Elliot Elementary and between Lincoln Southeast and Calvert Elementary. We will suss out the current level of interest in mentoring at these other schools and offer community support for the expansion of mentoring between high school students and elementary students. We can predict that we will see more community builders emerging as the quantity of mentoring goes up. To that end, we will inquire with Connective Collective members about their willingness to become mentors to emerging community builders.
A Partial History of Strengths Psychology:
NHRI Leadership Mentoring, which was led by Bill Hall and Don Clifton beginning in 1949, pairs UNL students with LPS students who are showing signs of natural mentoring with their peers at an early age. The origins of strengths psychology can be traced backed to programming that was created in the development of this mentoring program, and major findings in generativity research emerged from studying the mentors involved with NHRI. One thread of inspiration that led to the creation of the International Day of Strengths can be traced back to Character Day which took place on the International Day of Happiness in 2014.
Mentoring is a Form of Constructive Kindness:
- Constructive Kindness: is about helping others to see their strengths, to develop their core values, and to help them to translate their strengths into practical hope (being able to envision meaningful goals and pathways to our goals). Generative kindness is a type of transformative kindness where the action is motivated at least in part by an intention to enhance the wellbeing of future generation. Examples: mentoring, community leadership programs, etc.
- Compassionate Kindness: is about the prevention and alleviation of suffering. Domains where compassionate kindness can shine: social justice, homelessness, mental illness, disease, natural disasters.
- Playful Kindness: We have a play drive that is expressed through curiosity, creativity, humor, game creation, game play, and much more. We have an internal threat meter that originated to help us deal with predators. When the level of threat we detect in an environment is low enough that we feel safe, our play drive fires up. Play is about pursuing, doing, and/or creating interesting things or experiences. Examples: throwing a block party, getting people to play a game, etc.
Kindness (random and premeditated) goes by many other names such as: generosity, benevolence, beneficence, prosocial behavior, volunteerism, altruism, philanthropy, and community building to name a few. More on the three kinds of kindness.