Regular readers will know that on the 10th and 11th of September this year I posted about what happened to me while I was in New York at that incredible time. What I wanted to add was its long term effect on my life and work. My first child, Beatrice was only 14 months old when I found myself separated from her and unable to fly back from New York to London. The delays lasted 8 days. I was like a pacing tiger - agitated, outside and walking up and down the same streets! Throughout the week the consensus was that airports in New York were about to open and indeed they did open (and then closed) twice during that 8 day wait. UNICEF were happy to look after myself and the others at the meeting while we stayed in New York.
I felt a fool to have made the choice to leave my baby. On my way back home, I swore...and I stuck to it...that I would not travel away from my children for work - until the youngest was 5 years or more. For someone working in international development and wanting to continue with this work, this was a big decision.
With the arrival of baby number two, 9 months after the disaster (!), what then happened was 6 years of working out how to support people and projects working in international development from a distance. Quite by chance and early on in this process, The Child-to-Child Trust, (with whom I have had a long association) began a remote mentoring scheme to support their 'resource groups' in four countries through an action research project. I was tasked with supporting a group called CHETNA in India. I met my 'mentor partner' once in London at the start of the scheme but thereafter we had to find our way developing a system of contact that involved only email and skype.
What was amazing to me about the mentoring relationship was despite its 'light touch' it had a tremendous impact and it was also highly cost effective. There were no airfares or hotel bills, just a few days of consulting fees spread out over a year and costed at an hourly rate. But most importantly - there was complete local ownership of the action research project and of the process. We had a formal structure to the process and accountability on both sides but it felt different to the traditional type of consulting and it felt right. I was certainly no expert in mentoring - nor India - and as I told them, I felt that I learned lot more from them than I felt they learned from me! I have since found out that this is a characteristic of the mentoring relationship anyway. I guess what felt so right is that mentoring places the mentor partner at the centre of finding their own solutions.
I was so taken with the idea of the mentoring role in international development that I was determined to find out more. Through the CASS Centre for Charitable Effectiveness I found and then met Patrick Lavin, an expert mentor trainer who has been involved in a mentor training scheme for many years. The mentors he trains are management consultants coming from big business. They are linked free of charge to CEO's of qualifying third sector organisations. More on his excellent work and its results can be downloaded by clicking here.
Neither Patrick nor I could find very much to guide us on our growing mutual interest in mentoring for international development work. Patrick and I then began what has become an association of many years standing - discussing and developing an experimental mentor training system for International Non-Government Organisational (INGO) middle management and especially focusing on generating local capacity.
The two key skills needed to be a good mentor are very good listening skills and an ability to ask the right sort of open questions (at the right time and in the right way) and sometimes to know when to stop, to breathe and to reflect in silence. Patrick's system of training uses case studies, mini-lectures, role plays and reflection. I have come to believe that if international development is to be a locally led process then mentoring (and coaching) skills are absolutely vital to those passing on their skills.
So - that terrible time in September 10 years ago has led me through a decade of searching for new learning and new approaches that now seep into every aspect of my life. At the heart of the work I now do in children's participation is working with facilitators of the participatory process to swap teaching for coaching and mentoring. These facilitators are finding new ways to listen and use questions to place children at the centre of building solutions and taking action to solve problems relevant to their lives. We will only get a sufficiently strong cadre of facilitators of this type when they too feel listened to and supported by their managers.
Contact me if you are interested in finding out more about the mentoring system and let me know if and how you use mentoring in your work.
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