Mentor Spaces
Underrepresented students and early career professionals lack the confidence and network to successfully navigate their career path. Employers find it hard to attract, engage and retain underrepresented talent and underutilize employee resource groups. ERG members want to support their company's goals and develop their leadership, but lack bandwidth.
The Mentor Spaces platform allows corporate mentors to communicate with less experienced colleagues and prospective employees in career interest-based groups. The UX features asynchronous communication via Q&A to best facilitate personalized professional development and network building on one's own time. The technology matches early career professionals with the most relevant spaces based on career interests and development goals. Each space features vetted advice, resources, internship/job opportunities, and events.
The result is an intuitive user experience that builds confidence and social capital while achieving our customers’ goals.
At scale we would efficiently advance careers, leading to higher salaries and faster rate of promotion.
Black, Latinx and Indigenous students and early career professionals lack the confidence, network and social capital to efficiently transition into the workforce and advance their careers in lucrative career paths. According to the NY Fed, 44% percent of college graduates in their 20s are stuck in low wage, dead-end jobs, the highest rate in decades; Young people making less than $25,000 a year has spiked to the highest level since the 1990s. The statistics are more alarming for underrepresented minorities. Furthermore, Covid-19 has caused existing communities, whether in college/training organization or within corporate environments, to become disaggregated as many individuals are isolating at home.
Despite spending $8 billion annually on Diversity, Equity and Inclusion objectives, employers find it hard to attract, engage and retain underrepresented talent. Siloed HR teams miss opportunities to collaborate with employee networks or Employee Resource Groups (ERGs) to support talent acquisition, employer branding and retention opportunities. ERG members want to support their company's goals, but lack the bandwidth to adequately contribute.
While there is an existing ecosystem of university career services/alumni offices, non-profit support organizations/associations and workforce agencies that want to innovate, they lack the technological competencies necessary to effectively affect systemic change.
The Mentor Spaces web & mobile platform allows corporate mentors to communicate with less experienced colleagues and prospective employees in career interest-based groups. The UX features asynchronous communication via Q&A to best facilitate personalized professional development and network building on one's own time.
The technology leverages machine learning and AI to match early career professionals with the most relevant groups (spaces) based on their career interests and development goals. Each space features vetted advice, resources, internship/job opportunities, training providers and events recommended by people with expertise and curated by our technology.
The result is an intuitive user experience that builds confidence and social capital among our users, technological infrastructure for under-resourced Minority Serving Institutions and non-profit support organizations while supporting our customers' recruiting and retention workflows.
Our solution serves Black, Latinx and Indigenous students and early career professionals (learners) attending Minority Serving Institutions, alternative post-secondary training providers, and/or currently "stuck" trying to navigate along their career journey.
They are between the ages of 18-30 and can be described as non-traditional students/learners. They are first generation college students/grads, Pell eligible, and are oftentimes learning while being a caregiver and working.
The community we serve can be best described as overwhelmed because they realize they lack the time, resources and networks that would allow them to make career decisions with confidence.
We've researched nearly 10,000 learners from this community across 40 HBCUs for 2.5 years after receiving an "Innovations in Career Pathways" grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. We concluded that if students are able to efficiently connect alongside their peers with industry insiders who've had similar backgrounds and goals, they will have increased awareness of and confidence to better inform major declaration, class selection, experiential learning, and full-time employment opportunities.
We learned that information repositories and solo, as opposed to social, user experiences are ineffective catalysts for user engagement.
We invest heavily in UX research among all stakeholders to inform product design.
- Enable learners to make informed decisions about which pathways and jobs best suit them, including promoting the benefits of non-degree pathways to employment
Our target audience suffers from not knowing what they don't know, and the current pandemic has made them more disconnected from individuals that have critical information to inform their decisions. Although there is an abundance of content and resources published online, there is no effective way to quickly filter and synthesize it when the target population has significant time constraints, distrust in the system, lack of confidence and limited social capital.
Our solution not only closes the gap for better opportunity visibility and awareness to inform decision making, it incorporates the needs of industry because it involves them.
- California
- Colorado
- Georgia
- Minnesota
- Missouri
- North Carolina
- Virginia
- Washington
- Alabama
- Florida
- Indiana
- Louisiana
- Massachusetts
- Mississippi
- New York
- Ohio
- Tennessee
- Texas
- California
- Colorado
- Georgia
- Minnesota
- Missouri
- North Carolina
- Virginia
- Washington
- Alabama
- Florida
- Illinos
- Indiana
- Louisiana
- Massachusetts
- Mississippi
- New York
- Ohio
- Tennessee
- Texas
- Growth: An organization with an established product, service, or business model rolled out in one or, ideally, several communities, which is poised for further growth
4 Full-time Staff
6 Contractors
2 Part-time staff
We eat our own "dog food." We've built a community of more than 10,000 early and mid-career underrepresented minorities and I plan to hire at least 30% of our workforce from the platform we've created.

Founder & CEO