Become a Mentor, Not Just a Donor

Not everyone who wants to help has 132,000 shillings.

Plenty of people who want to help have something else like twenty years in the trade, a client list, a workshop, an eye that can tell in four seconds whether a seam will hold or a shot will cut. That is not a lesser contribution. In some cases it is the more valuable one.

Money gets a student through the door. What happens after they walk out of it is largely determined by whether anyone in the industry knows their name.

What our students actually lack

Delight trains on a competency-based model (seventy to eighty per cent of every programme is practical). Our graduates can cut, sew, draft, shoot, light, edit and build. Technically they are ready.

What a large share of them do not have is everything that surrounds the skill:

• Nobody in the industry who can vouch for them
• No sense of what work is actually worth, so they underprice and then resent it
• No model of how a professional handles a difficult client, a missed deadline or a job that went wrong
• No idea which of the many things they could do next is the one worth doing
• No one to ask the questions that are too small for a lecturer and too important to guess at

A student from a family already working in fashion or media absorbs all of this at home, without noticing. A first-generation learner has to find it somewhere. Mentors are where.

What mentoring here looks like

We keep it deliberately light. Most mentoring programmes fail because they ask busy people for more time than they have, and the mentor quietly disappears which teaches the student a lesson nobody intended.

So the baseline commitment is small and honest: one hour a month, for one academic year. In person at the campus, by phone, or by video call. If you do more, that is between you and your mentee. If you do exactly that, you have met the commitment in full and we will thank you sincerely.

Six ways to be useful, in ascending order of commitment

1. Give one talk

Come and speak to a class for an hour about what you actually do. Not a motivational address, a description of the job. What a week looks like. What you charge. What goes wrong. What you wish you had known at their stage.

This is the lowest-commitment thing on this page and the one students remember longest. Most of them have never heard a working professional describe the job in plain terms.

2. Review portfolios

Two hours, once a term. Sit with final-year students and go through their work the way a client or an employer would. Be direct. Students get abundant encouragement and very little honest critique, and they can tell the difference.

For fashion: construction quality, finishing, presentation, the coherence of a collection. For media: the reel, the edit, the framing, whether the story holds.

3. Set and judge a live brief

Give a class a real problem from your own work like a campaign, a shoot, a capsule collection, a brand refresh. Review what comes back. You get usable output and an unfiltered look at how twenty potential hires think; they get a portfolio piece with a real client name on it.

4. Take an attaché

Every Delight student completes industrial attachment (two months at Level 3, two and a half at Level 4, three months at Levels 5 and 6). Placements are the single hardest resource for us to secure, and the single most decisive factor in whether a graduate finds work.

You do not need a large organisation. A two-machine workshop, a freelance photography practice, a small agency (all of these are real placements). What matters is that the student sees paid work being done properly.

5. Mentor one student for a year

The core of the programme. One student, one hour a month, one academic year. You are matched by discipline and, where possible, by the kind of career the student is aiming at.

You are not expected to teach the curriculum, that is our job. You are there for everything around it: what to charge, how to talk to a client, whether to take the job, which of two paths to follow, how to recover from something that went badly.

6. Open a door

The highest-value and lowest-effort contribution available to anyone in the industry. One introduction. One recommendation. One phone call that begins “I have someone you should meet.”

You may do this once and never again and it will still have changed a graduate’s trajectory more than most cash gifts of similar convenience.

Who we need

From fashion and textiles: tailors and dressmakers, pattern cutters, designers, production managers, textile suppliers, boutique and workshop owners, stylists, fashion buyers, sustainable and upcycling practitioners.

From media and technology: photographers, videographers, editors, directors, producers, journalists, graphic designers, brand and agency people, software developers, data and AI practitioners, ICT professionals.

From business generally: anyone who has started and survived a small business. A large share of our graduates will be self-employed within two years, and most of what defeats them is not craft, it is pricing, cash flow, contracts, tax and clients who do not pay.

Alumni above all: If you graduated from Delight and are now working, you are the most credible mentor a current student can have. You sat in the same room. You know precisely what they do not yet know, because you did not know it either.

What we ask of you

• One hour a month, one academic year- If your circumstances change, tell us and we will re-match the student. Disappearing is the only thing we ask you not to do.
• Honesty– Tell students the truth about the industry, including the parts that are hard. They are adults and they are about to enter it.
• Professional boundaries– Mentoring happens at the campus, at your workplace, or by call. Meet at reasonable hours and in appropriate settings. Any concern about a student’s welfare comes straight to the college.
• A short check– All mentors provide identification and two professional references, and agree to our code of conduct. Mentors working with students under 18 are subject to additional safeguarding checks. This is not scepticism about you; it is the standard any institution owes its students, and mentors who understand that are the ones we want.
• Confidentiality– What a student tells you about their circumstances stays with you.

What you get

Mentors consistently report getting more out of this than they expected, so it is worth being concrete.

• First sight of talent– Mentors see graduating students before anyone advertises them. A significant share of mentors end up hiring or commissioning their mentee.
• A sharper view of your own trade– Explaining why you do something the way you do is the fastest way to find out whether you still should.
• Recognition– Mentors are listed on the college website and invited to graduation, exhibitions, runway shows and screenings as guests.
• A professional network– The mentor body includes people across fashion, media, technology and business in Nairobi. We convene it, and things happen between mentors that have nothing to do with us.
• A CPD record– Where your profession requires evidence of continuing professional development or community contribution, we will document your hours.

How the matching works

Step 1– Email [email protected] with the subject “Mentor“, or call +254 722 533 771. Tell us your field, roughly how much time you have, and which of the six options above appeals.

Step 2– A short conversation, in person or by call. We establish what you do, what you enjoy talking about and what you would rather not be asked to do.

Step 3– References and the code of conduct.

Step 4– A short orientation covering what students at each level already know, what they are anxious about, and where mentors typically over-reach.

Step 5– Matching. You meet your mentee at the campus with a member of staff present, agree how and when you will speak, and begin.

Step 6– We check in each term with both of you, separately. If a match is not working we will say so and re-match without anyone having to be diplomatic about it.

For organisations

Mentoring can be run as a staff volunteering programme. Five or ten of your people each mentoring one student is a substantial contribution to youth employment that costs your organisation ten hours a month in total.

It also works as a recruitment channel. Your staff assess the students informally for a year; you hire the ones who impressed them. We can structure a mentoring partnership alongside a sponsorship or attachment agreement (see our corporate partnership prospectus, or simply ask).

And if you can do both

This article exists because some people want to help and cannot write a cheque, and they should not feel they have nothing to offer. They have a great deal to offer.

But it is worth saying plainly: money and mentorship are strongest together. A sponsored student with a mentor completes at a higher rate and finds work faster than a sponsored student without one. If you are already sponsoring, adding an hour a month roughly doubles what your money achieves.

And many mentors become donors. Not because we ask, we do not, but because once you know a student by name, the arithmetic stops being abstract.

Start

Email [email protected], subject “Mentor”. Tell us what you do and how much time you have. We will do the rest.

You already know things a student here needs to know. That is the whole qualification.

Delight Technical College, A TVETA-accredited institution (TVETA/PRIVATE/TVC/0080/2022)

Muindi Mbingu Street, opposite Jevanjee Gardens, Nairobi CBD | P.O. Box 12988-00100 GPO Nairobi

[email protected] | +254 722 533 771 / +254 724 566 088 | www.delight.ac.ke

M-PESA Paybill 522533, Account 8023637#YourSurname | KCB Bank Kenya, Biashara Street, Delight Technical College, A/C 1296930947