What makes a good mentor

Mentoring goes on all around us - in our homes, our churches, our communities and our campus. But rarely do we stop to ponder the ingredients that go into the mentoring relationship.

Last month, Brown hosted the Annual Consultation of the Association for Religion and Intellectual Life (ARIL). The group's theme this year was "Becoming the People We Need: Mentoring and Mentoring Communities." The GSJ's Linda Mahdesian picked the brains of several ARIL members who mentor and design mentoring programs as part of their professional lives. Here's what the experts had to say when asked, "What makes a good mentor?"

• "One's own life experience of an awareness of having been mentored and what that was like is important. A mentor also needs a strong sense of self - including being a good listener - and a willingness to be vulnerable and open to irreducible differences and to meeting those differences and engaging them; an openness to being surprised in what happens in the encounter in interpersonal relationships. There are a couple of types of mentors - the first type is a mentoring that goes on in dyadic relationships and the second is mentoring in small groups and communities striving for the common good for that community whatever it is. - David Ames, Episcopal chaplain at Brown and former executive director of ARIL

• "In some ways, it's about showing how to do like me, offering support, encouragement and listening in order to believe in that possibility within the mentee. The key is looking in their eyes and seeing them. Students have told me that their mentors were 'someone who saw me.'... And the roles can shift - sometimes the mentor becomes the mentee, there are gifts to offer one another." - Jane Rinehart, associate professor, sociology and women's studies, Gonzaga University, Spokane, Wash.

• "Mostly, it's a person who is willing to share of themselves. Most people aren't mentors because they don't put the time in, they don't remember what it's like to be in vulnerable positions - just starting out as a student or as a professor or in some other endeavor. You don't learn the ropes anywhere except in a mentoring situation. Mentors are role models - not necessarily in a familial relationship. It's someone you can look up to in a field you want to model yourself in. A good mentor is a person who lives an exemplary life. Sometimes you can be a mentor and not even know it." - George Odell, professor of archeology, University of Tulsa

• "Mentors try to unite the head and the heart, coming across and being a whole person, being a good listener. The word 'education' literally means 'drawing out from' rather than filling up. ... Mentoring must be beyond helping new faculty learn the ropes ... it must be about helping people find a way and to provide the space to express and discuss issues meaningful to them. It goes beyond looking at each other as human doings, but as human beings. We don't have many opportunities to talk about our experiences. Where and when can we be fully human people? Many in the academy look down on people who have a spiritual interest of any kind. Some say you're not rational. But just like students need someone to care about them as a person, mentoring is a process-oriented thing, it's the relationship, the caring. Another factor is that the beautiful thing about teaching is that you're always learning, you're always a student, if you're open. If you get away from the power relationship, the more you can grow, and the more you can give back in return." - Art Stein, professor of political science, University of Rhode Island

• "A good mentor both shares knowledge and wisdom and draws out the possibilities of those he/she mentors. There's an interest in and care for those he/she mentors as well as a willingness to hold down to the rigors of their discipline - there's that loving side and also that disciplining side." - Laura Walters Baskett, associate chaplain and director of church relations, University of Tulsa

• "It's vision, voice and vocation - building a relationship that embodies mutuality. It's a vital relationality that so shapes one's reality, that it helps one to engage life with passion, with creativity, and a sense of purpose for the individual and the community. It's about respect - it supports the image of God in you and in me. ... Mentoring is creating that space, that forum in which people can grow, that allows for you and me not to be desperate. Too many of us in the age we live come from a place of desperation rather than abundance. ... Mentoring makes me able to internally mentor myself. Ultimately, mentoring allows the process of mentoring, the essence of it, to continue on the inside, so that I don't always need to get it from my mentor. Otherwise, it's pathological and dysfunctional." - Cheryl Ann Kirk-Duggan, director, Center for Women and Religion, and assistant professor of theology and womanist studies, Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley, Calif.

• "A good mentor is a person who has experienced nurturing and is willing to help connect with a person. They must be knowledgeable and understand that eventually the mentee becomes a peer. The letting go part can be difficult, but at some point, the mentor has to stand back and let go." - Donna Gilton, associate professor, Graduate School of Library and Information Studies, University of Rhode Island

• "Within each of us is an ecology of self voices. We each have the capacity to birth a voice that is authentically one's own and that works within one's profession. Mentors can be helpful in drawing forth that voice. It's not about parroting. It's not social reproduction." - James Keen, professor of social and global studies, Antioch College

• "Walt Whitman once wrote, 'I contain a multitude.' Mentors need to nurture the multitude in all of us." - Scott Holland, pastor, Monroeville Church of the Brethren, Monroeville, Pa.