ALLIES and the local Immigrant Employment Councils work with employers to facilitate their participation in mentoring for newcomers.

As a local employer, you can set up mentoring for newcomers within your organization, encouraging your employees to volunteer as mentors to support corporate values, develop leadership skills and build an inclusive community.

As a national employer, you can roll out mentoring for newcomers across your Canadian branches in the different cities where the mentoring program is active. ALLIES will support you at all levels in the process.

Why participate?

Employers who support mentoring report the following benefits:

• Mentoring helps the employer identify hidden talent;
• Employers improve their employees’ leadership and coaching skills;
• It is a form of community Involvement;
• It recognizes corporate volunteerism;
• Mentoring reinforces the core value of diversity; and
• Employers gain greater visibility.

Watch the following two videos for more benefits:

Setting up a Mentoring Program (3:57)

This short video describes why mentoring matters and some challenges you may encounter when setting up a mentoring program.

Reflections from the Field: How We Made Mentoring Work for Us (10:00)

In this video, Teri Currie, Group Head, Marketing, Corporate and People Strategies of the TD Bank Group, provides insights on how the company gained from from being mentors and how mentoring provided access to new talent.

How the ALLIES network supports this

Mentoring programs are currently active in the following cities: Halifax, Montreal, Ottawa, Kingston, Toronto, Kitchener-Waterloo, London, Calgary, Edmonton and Vancouver. In each of those cities, a member of the ALLIES network can meet with you and assess your needs as an employer and identify the next steps for your participation in the program.

Once the decision is made, the local partner will be your one-stop shop for newcomer mentoring. They will provide information sessions to your employees, offer orientation as well as the tools required for appropriate mentor matching and communications.

As a national employer, you may also want to create a strategy coordinated from your Head Office. ALLIES would then be your point of contact to coordinate the national implementation of the program in different cities.

National Employers Active in Mentoring Programs

To become involved as a corporate partner in the National Mentoring Initiative please contact Peter Paul.

Funding for the National Mentoring Initiative is provided by TD Bank Group.