Connect|Focus|Grow in Greater Milwaukee: Seeing Future Possibilities

July 12, 2021

By: MENTOR

National Mentoring Project, Connect Focus Grow, Workforce Development, Our Affiliates

For Toni White, there’s no question that workplace mentoring plays a key role in recruiting and retaining youth employees. She sees it everyday in her work as Director of Program Services at Employ Milwaukee, where she oversees youth and adult reentry programs and connects young people with education and employment opportunities.

Originally, Employ Milwaukee’s programming mainly consisted of placing youth at a work site, with no intentional or structured mentoring. But when they were looking for ways to increase retention, enhance work placements, and provide more support to the youth they work with, Toni felt “it made sense to train our worksite supervisors to approach their youth from a mentoring concept versus just a young person looking for a job.”

That’s when MENTOR Greater Milwaukee introduced Employ Milwaukee to the National Mentoring Project and its Connect|Focus|Grow training curriculum, which seeks to get more employers hiring, managing, and thinking with a mentoring mindset. Betty Hill, Program Coordinator at MENTOR Greater Milwaukee, explains that Connect|Focus|Grow “helps with the open-ended questions, cultural competency, and cultural humility. It prepares [employers and supervisors] to dig a little deeper in forming relationships that go beyond employer-employee. It creates a system of support.”

The benefits of workplace mentoring are numerous. For young people, Toni explained, “We can give them someone on that work site, someone right there, available, accessible to have those conversations, redirect, refocus if that’s needed. It’s immediate. Our young people live in the microwave age. They want it and they want it now. So what better way than to supply them with somebody who’s right there with them?”

Toni also noted that, since many young people provide financial support to their families, increasing job retention of youth “really makes an impact on the households that we serve.” The benefits are seen clearly by all those involved in the work, but The National Mentoring Project hopes to drive further progress by analyzing the impact and using that data to help elevate the importance of workplace mentoring and guide future efforts. As Betty explained, “the data that we collect begins to show where there might be areas of improvement or where we can offer our services a bit more, maybe recruit more employers to come and be part of the National Mentoring Project.”

For organizations interested in developing workplace mentoring programs, Betty recommends that work sites and programs use the Civic Change app and other forms of evaluations to collect data on what type of supports and opportunities young people are looking for. Toni also added the importance of exposing youth to a variety of opportunities and said that workplaces need to be “more intentional about how they do what they do, from recruitment to outreach, and to really look at how they define support.”

Toni noted that “Employers are understanding that they have an aging workforce, that the youth are the pipeline for the future of workforce … and at the end of the day you have to invest in that workforce of the future.” She added that employers in Milwaukee, because of “the environment that we have been in during COVID and civil unrest, and with Milwaukee being one of the highly segregated cities in our country, know diversity is key. Not just diversity, but equity and inclusion, you have to have strategies around that.

Employers need to have a vested interest in the success of the youth. [A quality mentor is] someone who really believes in the aptitude and ability of our young people and really helps them to grow within that space.”

The partnership between Employ Milwaukee and MENTOR Greater Milwaukee started small, primarily servicing the city of Milwaukee, but their work has really scaled up and has expanded to the county of Milwaukee.

In reflecting on the ways mentoring has been integrated into the services provided by Employ Milwaukee, Toni says, “I feel like it’s been such a great added enhancement to our programming, that I feel like it can only get better from here … I see the partnership growing, just figuring out how we can do more. We’re growing our youth services and we’re going to be integrating and implementing this mentoring piece within each one of our youth programs because we know that that’s what our young people in our city need. They need mentors and models that look like them. They need to be exposed to different people, different careers, different environments, and so we want to make sure that whatever environment they’re in, that they’re getting the type of surface level they need to be successful.”

How you can get involved

The National Mentoring Project is managed by MENTOR National in partnership with the America’s Promise Alliance / Center for Promise and with support from the Schultz Family Foundation. Find out how to bring this program to your organization, here.