Vision
A team of faculty and staff are charged with envisioning an infrastructure that provides students multiple pathways, skills and agency to build meaningful relationships and mentoring networks with a community of peers, faculty and staff.
Mentoring in Meaningful Relationships
Connections Rooted at Elon
Boldly Elon, the university’s strategic plan, begins with a bold and historic investment in the most powerful impact on learning — people. Over the course of the decade, the university will invest in faculty and staff positions so that our commitment to relationship-based mentoring is a key outcome of an Elon education. The community’s stated vision for 2030 is that 100% of Elon graduates will be able to identify faculty mentors, staff mentors and peer student mentors.
Our Elon community is composed of multiple stakeholders: students, faculty, staff, alumni, family members, and community partners. Starting in the fall of 2022, Elon’s Mentoring Initiative Design Team (MDT) was tasked to develop, foster, and elevate strategic partnerships and programs across the institution. Their aim is to provide an attainable path by which Elon is an exemplar institution that is committed to providing all members of the university community with sustainable and equitably accessible skills and opportunities to build multiple meaningful relationships.
Our Elon faculty, staff, and students are already committed to and doing high-quality work to ensure the development of meaningful relationships, specifically regarding mentoring. This engagement is found across all levels of the institution.
The campus culture endorses relationship building through the integration of curricular and co-curricular initiatives both on campus and beyond as well as the layering of high impact practices and student employment.
We believe that the goal of a collegiate experience is the successful navigation through the institution en route to a unique, meaningful, and dynamic purpose, career, and life. At Elon finding and maintaining meaningful relationships through both opportunities and skill development reinforces our commitment to cherish the Numen Lumen that resides within all of us.
Relationships in Action
Whether they begin in the classroom, at a campus job, in an organization or residence hall, mentoring relationships have a lasting impact on faculty, staff and students. They often define mentors’ and mentees’ Elon experience.
The Team
A group of faculty, staff, students and alumni were selected to participate on the Mentoring Initiatives Design Team, which is made up of the executive team, co-curricular subcommittee, curricular subcommittee and integration subcommittee.
Pilot Programs
In the fall of 2023, the Mentoring Design Team implemented several pilot programs based on the meaningful relationships framework the group developed in the 2022-23 academic year. As of October 2023, six programs are underway.