It's Time to #ThankYourMentor

LinkedIn, the world's largest professional network on the Internet with 380 million members worldwide, and my FAVORITE social network, is leveraging the platform and community to mobilize members to mentor. MENTOR: The National Mentoring Partnership (MENTOR) has teamed up with LinkedIn to elevate the impact of mentoring relationships and call on more adults to mentor young people.  MENTOR’s research in a report called The Mentoring Effect found that young adults who were at risk for falling off track but who had a mentor were 55 percent more likely to go on to college and 78 percent more likely to volunteer regularly in their communities. Yet, one in three young people is reaching age 19 without ever connecting to a mentor either formally through a program or informally through family, community or social networks.Right now, on mentor.linkedin.com, L‎inkedIn is featuring member stories that demonstrate the potential of mentoring relationships both in the workplace and in communities between adults and young people. LinkedIn Influencers, a select group of leaders in business and industry who publish articles on the platform, will also focus their upcoming posts on the topic of mentoring.As a key player in this effort, MENTOR is providing expertise on ethe key ingredients of quality youth mentoring as well as thousands of volunteer mentoring opportunities for LinkedIn members to connect with. These opportunities are sourced from MENTOR’s Mentoring Connector, which is the only national database of mentoring programs that are screened for safety and effectiveness using the national standards for quality youth mentoring.