Mentoring for Social Inclusion in Europe: Sharing Knowledge and Building Capacity

Mentoring relationships between a volunteer and a person with fewer opportunities have proven a successful way to foster inclusion and diversity. Ment4EU helps higher education keep abreast of the...

Mentoring relationships between a volunteer and a person with fewer opportunities have proven a successful way to foster inclusion and diversity. Ment4EU helps higher education keep abreast of the growing significance of social mentoring in policy and practice across nations. The consortium of universities from Austria, Belgium, Ireland, the Netherlands and Spain enables academia to better tackle Europe’s big challenges. It builds capacity, shares knowledge and promotes community engagement.

Led by innovation principles, Ment4EU makes available findings published in different languages, as well as teaching concepts and material. It analyses examples of how social mentoring has been developed successfully in Higher Education. Based on standards for inclusion, various actors and diverse uses are taken into account. Dissemination activities make resources available for different stakeholders inside and outside academia, i.e. lecturers and researchers, students and professionals.

Ment4EU produces resources that are openly accessible and expandable. It publishes a digital handbook on social mentoring in Europe and a searchable database on the main bulk of research. It implements and tests new curricula on social mentoring and multimedia resources (videos). It offers students and staff opportunities for mobility. It provides an innovation manual on how universities can develop mentoring schemes for social inclusion and engage more responsibly with their communities.