Mentorship Programs Work

Mentoring on a Wider Scale

Seattle Colleges is at the forefront of community colleges that have embraced and pioneered innovations. Still, as we work to develop and broadly integrate today’s best practices in education, something is missing: wide-scale student mentoring.  

Existing mentorship programs at Seattle Colleges—like the federally-funded TRIO program, operating at North, Central, and South, and Ready! Set! Transfer! (RST), funded by the National Science Foundation—have seen success in building identity, confidence, and completion and transfer rates. The challenge is these and other mentoring programs reach only a fraction of the students who could benefit. For example, in 2018 South Seattle College had nearly 4,000 TRIO-eligible students, but funding sufficient for only 191.

Hearing from Students

The overall goal is to develop a network among students and mentors across all our colleges—students like Nahom and Myron.

Nahom's Story	Myron's Story

Initial results are encouraging. For example, Springboard8 at Seattle Central, now part of Project Baldwin, began as a pilot in 2021. Seattle's King5 TV reported on the success of the program in its first year.