Routes Mentoring Programme Producer, Wieke, shared this beautiful spoken word piece with our 2021 cohort of mentors and mentees at their end of programme celebration last month.

Teri-Ann Bobb Baxter is an actor and trainer, who is the founder of Speak Up. She’s also a long-time Routes facilitator, delivering the Public Speaking Workshops on our Mentoring Programme. In this blog, you can read her top tips to get ready for any gathering, presentation or public event!

Mentor Silva and mentee Halima write about their time together on the Mentoring Programme. They describe what it’s like to get started, and what the journey across the four months of the Programme can feel like.

“I never had a mentor before. Meeting my mentor for the first time was the best thing ever. It was like meeting a doctor - that’s how I felt. This is someone who can help me heal - the old me who was passive and felt left behind in this modern world…”

“If there is one thing I have learned over the last 15 months, it is the importance of connecting with and supporting others. But I wasn’t sure what to expect. What if we didn’t connect or have anything in common? What if our time together didn’t meet Lili’s expectations of the programme? What if we didn’t achieve what she had set out to do?”

“I tried some of the things by myself before. I Googled, did this and that, but I didn’t know how to do it. When I told Emma about the UCAS thing… She made it look like ‘You can do it’. That is something I will never forget.”

A poem by Routes’ Mentoring Programme Producer, Wieke, for our fifth cohort.

An online exhibition by 2021-21 mentee, Mutiat. “Things I find beautiful is about seeing the beauty that surrounds us in our everyday life, being more aware of our surroundings, and finding the beautiful things in our community as we go about our daily lives.”