Cluster-based Mentorship

There are not enough Native and Indigenous faculty at CU Boulder to support all of our Native students and we don't want to assign more labor to folks who are already too often asked to serve their department or community. For this reason, we designed a cluster-based mentorship model that assigns multiple faculty and students to a mentorship group. In this way, the overlap of experiences is better equipped to complement students' identities and backgrounds.

• Overlapping mentor and mentee experiences to better capture student identities and backgrounds
• Nucleation of community to support students emotionally and psychologically in addition to offering career advice and guided professional development
• Scaffolded mentorship as current students become mentors for the following year's incoming cohort of students

Supervision & Tracking

We'll be sending out regular surveys to both students and faculty members to ensure you feel supported and hear throughout this program.

• Survey data helps us report on our program to fulfill requirements of the grant
• Your feedback helps us improve the program as you go through it
• Information gathered throughout the program helps us demonstrate proof-of-concept for this mentorship model so we can expand this to other groups on campus and secure additional future funding

We provide training to both students and faculty members to ensure you understand the nuances of being a good mentor and mentee. Our training is structured to help you develop skills that reach beyond the superficial checkboxes of other mentorship training programs.

You and your cluster have control over how your community looks. We provide mentorship agreement templates for your cluster and a one-on-one mentorship agreement template if you choose to pursue an individual mentoring outside of your cluster meetings. These templates guide you through establishing norms, expectations, and boundaries in your mentorship interactions to help you achieve your goals and enable you all to be vulnerable as you discuss deep topics related to identity and academia.

Agency & Power

• Academic spaces often suppress the voices of marginalized groups. We are building a student-centered platform via which students can voice their needs to engaged faculty. Many faculty members carry a lot of weight in their respective programs. We ask faculty to use that to advocate for their community, making this program a grassroots approach for improving your academic professional communities.
• We will provide guided content for your cluster meetings for the first few months. After this point, we invite students to approach conversations with their own content.
• This is not our program to name. This program belongs to students, so we invite you to propose a name for this program that resonates with your intentions.