The MentorPairing magazine
Practical reporting for the people who design, match, run and measure women's mentoring programs at US associations and universities.
Nine articles, written for coordinators who own intake, matching, training and the report that lands on a board or a dean's desk. Published by Jimenez Julien.
practical guide
A working method for turning application data into defensible pairs: define your match criteria before intake, weight them, run a first pass, then hand-review the exceptions instead of every single pair.
comparison
Cohort programs give you clean reporting and shared milestones. Rolling intake keeps momentum year round. Here is how the two models differ in workload, matching quality and renewal timing.
mistakes to avoid
Most pairs do not fail from bad chemistry. They fail from an unscheduled second meeting, an unclear ask, and a coordinator who finds out three months late that nothing ever happened.
regulation and compliance
If your mentees are enrolled students, their application answers may be education records. What FERPA covers, what counts as directory information, and how consent and vendor agreements should be handled.
case study
A structured look at how a volunteer led program recovers: shrinking the cohort, rewriting the mentor ask, moving from open ended pairing to a fixed six month term, and rebuilding recruitment.
trends and outlook
Corporate sponsorship of mentoring has shifted from goodwill to measured outcomes. What sponsors now expect in reporting, how naming and access get negotiated, and where the budgets are moving.
checklist
A week by week list covering application close, screening, matching, mentor training, introduction emails and the first check-in, with the items coordinators most often discover far too late.
numbers and benchmarks
Program cost is mostly coordinator time. A framework for building a defensible per pair figure from intake, matching, training, check-ins, events and reporting before you ask for a budget.
field report
Coordinators are replacing hour long orientations with short, targeted preparation. What is being cut, what has to stay, and how the first meeting prompt ends up doing most of the teaching.
Every article in The Pairing Desk eventually points back to the same afternoon, when a closed application list becomes a confirmed pair list. The complete guide covers criteria, weighting, the first pass and the exception review, with the mentor capacity checks coordinators skip.
How do I actually match two hundred mentors and mentees without spending my whole month on it?
Then work outward: the eight other pieces in The Pairing Desk each take one part of it further, and every one links back here.
