A Conversation With the Director of Workplace Mentoring, Jeronima Nix
April 12, 2023
MENTOR Staff, Workforce Development, Mentoring Stories
Jeronima Nix is the Director of Workplace Mentoring at MENTOR. She shares her insights on mentoring, partnerships, and her path to her current role.
What brought you to MENTOR?
Prior to MENTOR, a lot of my work had been around youth development, specifically career readiness and post-secondary preparation. In my prior job at Breakthrough Providence, I had begun to incorporate mentoring into the high school program I was overseeing, and that was where I became connected with MENTOR Rhode Island and subsequently MENTOR National.
In my previous role, I got to support youth in a lot of ways: in person and virtually, collaborating with partners, and providing support for families through their children’s journeys. When I think of youth success, I think about the saying that “it takes a village,” and that was where partnerships played a big role in providing holistic support to my youth. Whether it was bringing together professionals across the state across a variety of fields or partnering with a university, I helped youth tap into their current networks and see the power of building on their social capital. One of the biggest challenges was when the COVID pandemic hit a few months before I was set to launch.
When the pandemic hit, the way students and families were able to show up was majorly impacted, and I spent a lot of time figuring out how I, and we as an organization, could support them. As I worked with youth around their career readiness and how it had shifted throughout the pandemic, I recognized I was asking myself the same questions. I asked myself what kind of impact I wanted to continue to make and who I knew in my network that could help me identify my next step—working with youth was rewarding but I felt like there was more I could do. And through asking myself those questions, I recognized my aspirations had changed and the work I was doing had helped me hone in on the fact that I wanted to engage in career readiness and youth support in a very different way and potentially on a larger scale.
A college friend sent the job posting at MENTOR and thought it might be a good fit. Initially, I was apprehensive because I wasn’t sure my experience was exactly what MENTOR was seeking, but obviously, it worked out in the best way.
What does your role at MENTOR entail?
Before I go into that, it’s important to state that the biggest shift I’ve made in my transition is my target audience. While I keep youth at the core, my role is focused on supporting the caring adults and systems who will eventually work with youth. With this in mind, my work essentially falls into two buckets. The first involves direct corporate engagement work. I support current corporate partners in their existing work and work with prospective partners to develop mentoring initiatives. If a partner doesn’t have a program in place, I help them figure out what a mentoring initiative or program could look like. If there is an existing program in place, I help them develop strategies to support the mentors in their program and expand on the results they’re seeing. That happens through training and developing resources for their use, as well as continued conversations around how to best support mentors in the program.
The second bucket is around our workplace mentoring strategy as a whole. I work with Labor Market Information (LMI) to understand which industries are projected to have great growth and return on investment for youth across the country. I consider: How has mentoring supported an increase in employee retention and job satisfaction? What are areas of opportunity that mentoring can elevate for youth and employers? What resources do we need to develop or elevate that will support caring adults and young people themselves?
Across both buckets, I’m also working with our Affiliates around the country, which has been really exciting for me. My previous role was at an affiliate of a national organization, so Affiliate-level work was very familiar to me. I think that background helps give me a multifaceted perspective as I engage with partners and ideate on resources for the field.
A major advantage of working at the national level and focusing specifically on workforce development means that I’m able to hone in on MENTOR’s strategy and identify a plan to scale. For example, let’s say there’s a partner on the national level who either wants to pilot a new program or expand an existing one into a geographic area where we have an Affiliate. I work with that local Affiliate to think about what their role can be in this work and how I can support them moving forward in terms of a warm handoff. I want to ensure they have continued support, so it doesn’t feel as though I’ve thrown them this new partnership that they have to figure it out on their own. And then on the flip side, if there’s a corporate partner working with an Affiliate who wants to expand that work nationally, I can help ideate how to scale that connection and that work nationally.
What’s the most exciting part of your work?
I think the exciting part is the scale of the impact my work has. I definitely miss working with youth – I got to provide individualized support and get to know them and their families. But when I look at my work now, there are times I’m working with one corporate entity that’s working across many states and with hundreds of students. And then there’s another entity working with even more students than the first one, and so on. Being able to see the larger impact is exactly what I had imagined as I was going through my own career exploration.
Knowing how many students are being served and supported through the work MENTOR supports is especially meaningful to me as someone who’s been through similar programs and comes from similar backgrounds as many of the young people being served by our corporate partners. I’m able to support these programs and mentors in a way that honors youth and their voices and can help make sure companies are doing this at the highest quality possible.
On a personal level, it’s exciting how much opportunity there is for me to grow – and how much I’ve grown already. Partnerships is a lot of the work I have been engaged in throughout my early career and it’s been great to transfer those skills and experiences to our corporate engagement work. I’ve been able to learn about the different sectors our corporate partners work in, which helps me think about which partnerships will meet our strategic goals. I always told my youth to step out of their comfort zones, and it’s been great for me to have the opportunity to do that.
How do you think your prior experience working with young people has benefited you in this role?
Like I said, the work that I did before was just so close to my heart because I was them. I identify as Latina. I’m a first-generation American and student. I translated for my parents very early on – verbally translating as well as reading mail and other important things – and still do. So, I’d participate in after-school programs, but would also make sure I was home to help out. And then I was the first in my family to go to college and to grad school.
Part of my previous roles involved thinking about my own experiences and missed opportunities to support and develop programs that helped youth prepare for their futures, whether that involved college or going straight to the workforce. As a senior staff member in a small organization, I had the chance to work on everything from direct student support to fundraising and communications to operations—all with the goal to support youth on their path to post-secondary success. This let me see all the inner workings of a program: both its impact on young people and how youth voice is central. And so in my work now, I have the ability to think about all the different factors that go into making a program successful. For example, I look at the Elements of Effective Practice for Mentoring™ and strategize on an implementation plan. What does it look like for a three-person team, for example, to appropriately screen all potential mentors and still make their deadlines? When I talk to a corporate partner and hear their vision for what they want to do with their mentoring programs, I’m able to engage in deep discussion about what systems need to be in place to see that vision come to fruition. As we collaborate, I think about the insight I received from my students around their needs and the types of opportunities they needed to get to where they wanted to be.
What kinds of partnerships are you hoping to create or strengthen?
I’ve been thinking a lot about where the country is going and what the job market will look like as a result. There’s so much change happening right now. For example, Gen Z is beginning to enter the workforce, and because of COVID they have never really been in the office. How will that affect what the office looks like in five or ten years? How does impact the need for a mentor and the structure of support systems?
I’ve been looking at partnerships in industries that are projected to have great growth and a high return on investment for young people. For example, right now we’re working on a Hospitality Employer Toolkit that will bolster the Hospitality industry and gain insight on how unique that experience is. Up next are Technology and Healthcare toolkits. Those three industries have such a high need for workers and are industries young people really want to get into.
As a Latina, I think a lot about my community and other communities of color. What does mentoring currently look like for those communities? What can we learn? It’s important to recognize that mentoring already existed in communities of color and there exist so many rich opportunities to collaborate with the workforce to both elevate our communities and move our society forward. As a Spanish speaker I’m mindful that while we are developing resources and research for the movement that we make it that much more accessible to our audience, so I was excited to that Becoming A Better Mentor was just translated into Spanish.
On a personal level, did mentoring play an important role for you when you were growing up?
Absolutely.
When I was younger, I didn’t have a lot of Latinx people that I felt were mentors or role models that I had a personal connection to, so I would look at other women of color and see what they did and what they had to do to get where they were. For example, I’d try to understand how Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor overcame challenges on her path to where she is today. I’ve never spoken to her and she has no idea who I am, but in a way, I see someone like that – a strong Latina woman – as a mentor.
I have one amazing mentor who’s played a key role in many parts of my life. He helped me navigate the journey from high school to college. As a Black man, he has an understanding of what it means to be a person of color on the campus of a predominantly white institution. He helped me navigate the culture shock and impostor syndrome that comes with not knowing how to navigate a space like that, and he really helped me find my place on campus and empower myself. When I was applying to grad school, he helped me figure out what I wanted to study and helped me articulate my vision in the application. And then when I was ready for a career change, he asked me really thoughtful questions and gave me insightful ways to reflect on what I really wanted. He didn’t tell me what to do – he guided me in figuring it out myself. He actually introduced me to my husband and was the one who married us in 2021, so he plays an important role in many facets of my life!
I think one reason working at MENTOR was exciting for me was that I came to realize how mentoring has played such a huge role throughout my life, particularly throughout my career. From my own experiences with a mentor to my previous roles helping youth learn from my experiences, I realized mentoring was a key thread throughout all my formative experiences – I had just never articulated or seen it in that way until I saw this role.
Are there any new initiatives you’re hoping to try? Any you’re particularly excited about continuing to build on?
I’m very excited about a Career Readiness Mentoring Toolkit we’re developing with Juma, one of our partners. This toolkit is designed for career readiness programs to develop mentoring as part of the culture of the organization. So rather than being a resource for creating a mentoring program, it will be a public-facing toolkit that can be used by any nonprofit that wants to have a culture of mentoring within an organization. As someone who came from a small nonprofit, this is exciting to me because it will allow even organizations with limited capacity and resources to think about how they can integrate the culture of mentoring into the work that they are doing.
As a member of the systems team, I think a lot about the processes and systems in place and how we can ensure they are doing the best they can for youth. I also think a lot about MENTOR’s own way of doing the work: how do we work with corporate entities? How do we work with Affiliates?
I believe the work I’m doing is relatively new at MENTOR, and I feel like there’s a lot of opportunity to grow our existing strategies and evolve going forward, especially as we expand on current partnerships and develop new ones. One of the newer strategies I’m beginning to ideate on is the wage gap and how mentoring can support in closing it. Before that, I’m looking forward to working with my colleague Tracy Terranova, Director of Education Partnerships, on workplace learning. From apprenticeships, internships, shadows, and many more experiential learning opportunities we can strengthen relationships between schools and employers while providing credit to youth on their path and supporting the development of professionals.
Were there any challenges, either expected or unexpected?
One challenge I’d foreseen before coming into this role was how my role would provide Affiliate support. When I worked in an organization that was an affiliate of a larger national organization, I remembered seeing the national team doing all this great work, but not knowing how I could get our work to that level. Now that I’m on the national side and am a part of the great things that are happening, I want to ensure Affiliates are benefiting from that success and are seeing that impact in their own work. At the same time, I want to respect where each Affiliate is. Maybe a certain partnership or program isn’t within their capacity or priorities right now, and we need to honor that. My goal is to support them while also keeping in mind our national strategy and goals. Communication is key here, and having an Affiliate team has been really helpful for that.
Is there anything else you’d like to share?
I’m really excited to continue learning and growing into this role as we support the workforce and workplaces.