Giving Compass' Take:

• Keishia Ashe and Tiffany St. Bernard are the founders of ManyMentors, an e-mentoring nonprofit that pairs tech professionals with young people looking to break into the industry. 

• How can donors help expand mentoring opportunities in the tech space? What are the gaps in this field that funders could help address through sustained support of mentorship programs? 

• Read about the roles women can play as leadership mentors. 


When people think of mentorship, they probably imagine talking about career advancement over coffee, or meeting over lunch to chat about how a new job is going.

But how central should physical meetups be to professional guidance when so much communication is digital?

In 2011, Keshia Ashe and Tiffany St. Bernard, who both work in the biomedical-engineering field, co-founded ManyMentors, an “e-mentoring” nonprofit that connects tech professionals with young people interested in the field. Potential mentees cover a broad spectrum of ages, from middle-schoolers to college students. The organization, which has over 400 mentors and mentees, started in Connecticut and has branched out to New Hampshire and upstate New York.

Ashe compares the program to a social network: Students use an app to pick a track, such as academic success or college prep, and that shapes how they’ll be mentored.

"We’re in front of a screen, what, 90 percent of the time? You can’t tell me that you can’t take 15 minutes out of your week to connect with someone, to make yourself available to somebody who is not a personal friend or colleague. We’re in the tech age—we have mobile apps, online platforms. You don’t have an excuse as to why you can’t be involved, other than you don’t want to." - Keshia Ashe

Read the full article about e-mentoring by Elisha Brown at The Atlantic.