Are you a student or young professional and challenged to find your path in global health? Are you an established professional who wants to give back to the global health community or look for a young protege that can help you with your research? The Global Health Mentorships Program, which runs from August to December 2017, connects Students and Young Professionals (SYPs) with experienced professionals from different fields within Global Health to facilitate mutually beneficial SYP and mentor working relationships, to strengthen skills and expand global health knowledge. Applications are open until June 15.
As a student and young professional (SYP) interested in global health, one can be faced with many hurdles exploring opportunities for the first internship, graduate programs or first job. Global health has become a rather competitive field to work in, given its emerging nature but also due to the fact that sometimes many institutions are not able to grasp the entireness of global health, comparing it to medicine, clinical health or social science. On the other hand, most of the time, programs that do specialise in global health receive an enormous amount of application, making it nearly impossible to match demand and need.
At the same time, for an established professional in global health, it can be rather challenging to find an SYP with a particular skill set and right motivation to join or continue long term projects and interventions. Providing mentorship can act as a bridge, bringing together SYPs who are eager to find their path in global health and established professionals with specialized experience in particular global health subfields.
The Global Health Mentorships (GHMe) program is focusing on solving these issues. The program strives to establish and facilitate mutually beneficial SYP and mentor working relationships, to strengthen skills, expand global health knowledge and promote international networking, ultimately aiming to make mentoring more visible in global health and enhancing its value to individual, community and global levels.
The online, global group-based GHMe program was established by two young professional organisations through a collaboration of the Global Health Next Generation Network (GHNGN) and the Swedish Network for International Health (SNIH) in 2015. In the first year, the program received 126 applications and almost triple that number in 2016 from both SYPs and established professionals.
Mentors and SYPs receive a handbook and five skills based modules, which they can utilize during their monthly meeting.The idea is that not only SYPs can learn from their mentor, but also that SYPs learn from each other through peer-to-peer mentoring. In 2017, the program opens its doors once again and accepts Mentor and SYP applications until the 15th of June.
Global Health Mentorships
Global Health Mentorships is an online, global, group based mentorships program, founded as a non-profit organization by the Swedish Network for International Health and the Global Health Next Generation Network in January 2015. It is based on online communication to facilitate remote participation and is operated by 16 team members placed on four different continents. It encourages out of the box thinking through a continuously updated five-month curriculum to support the launch of new solutions in the global health arena.