No Limits

iMentor's mission is to improve the lives of young people from underserved communities through innovative, technology-based approaches to youth mentoring and education. It has pioneered a new service model that integrates the Internet with the traditional in-person mentoring model for connecting youth with caring adults.
The challenge was twofold. Programmatically, iMentor was aiming to answer a growing national demand for a comprehensive mentoring solution similar to what the group had pioneered in New York City. And secondly, while iMentor understood the extraordinary potential of technology to power its work, it lacked a strong IT foundation for itself. In 2006, as the organization struggled to manage growing numbers of adult volunteers and the young people assigned to them in a simple spreadsheet, iMentor reached out to NPower NY for IT help.

Based on iMentor's over five years of experience with online mentoring, NPower NY worked hand in hand with the group to design and build a custom software platform that encapsulated iMentor's entire program model in a robust, secure, always-on system: iMentor Interactive (iMi). Now adult mentors and youth have "safe spaces" on the Internet to conduct appropriately supervised and structured interactions. The system also integrates calendaring and event information alongside resources, guides and "prompts" for adult mentoring volunteers.
These changes alone greatly enhanced iMentor's service capacity. The automated system to match youth newly enrolled by the agency with compatible adult volunteers is a feature that NPower NY built in response to a need identified by iMentor to increase program efficiency. NPower NY also built in several advanced tools for program monitoring, tracking and reporting, saving untold hours of staff time and strengthening iMentor's approaches to potential funders and other stakeholders.

iMentor's platform has proven an enormous success. In particular, iMi and its advanced capabilities played a vital role in helping iMentor secure large-scale new funding to scale nationally and internationally. To date 13 member organizations have integrated iMi into their mentoring programs to increase efficiency and provide mentoring to those who need it most. The platform is even being adopted by some large corporations to power mentoring programs involving their employees. "There are no limits, really," says Theresa Stroisch, iMentor's managing director.