Male Mentor

We are an award-winning mentoring charity working in Portsmouth and the surrounding area. Our work involves mentoring young men aged 18-25, either already involved in the criminal justice system or in danger of becoming involved. We also work with care leavers and other vulnerable young men, usually on a referral basis.

We are looking for emotionally mature men (around 35+) to help us in this work by becoming mentors.

To become A Band of Brothers mentor, you will first be invited to participate in a 6 week Mentor Induction Training (MIT) programme, meeting for up to an hour a week with one of our fully trained mentors. In this process, you’ll find out more about us and what we do. If you then feel you’d like to train as an abob mentor, you will undertake a weekend course (currently online) that will teach you the abob style of mentoring. This is essentially about holding a space for the young man and guiding him to look at how he got to where he is, why he shows up the way he does… and how well does this serve him (and those around him) in his life today? How would he like his life to be and how might he go about achieving this?

If a man doesn’t get to tell his story, then his story tells him….

After a DBS check (funded by abob), you will then be able to mentor a young man, taking up to an hour a week on our 10-week program. This is Level 1 mentoring.

Level 2 mentoring - where we mentor in community - would require you to first attend a residential primary training weekend (5pm Friday to 3pm Sunday). This will allow you to support young men on our 12-week Quest for Community.

There will also be regular weekly meetings on a weekday evening.

A Band of Brothers also offers opportunities for further leadership training, should this be of interest to you.

All this is offered at no cost. All we require is your commitment to mentor a young man.

Please note that we are looking for men who are prepared to make a long-term commitment because this is what we offer the young men that we mentor.

Skills

We have men from all walks of life take up the challenge. However, a key requirement is an ability to listen and to be open-minded about the world and the diversity of the men in it. We are a community building organisation, that seeks to support young men by giving them a healthy community to belong to. There are also a variety of skills needed in our daily operations as well as the mentoring roles, offering men additional ways to volunteer. For all roles, you will receive in depth training and support.

- this is a long term commitment