Bringing 53 years of experience from generation to generation, The Turkish Education Foundation (TEV) has gone from giving 119 students a scholarship in its first year to today, giving scholarships to 250 thousand students. The foundation, one of the greatest supporters of education in Turkey, exists alongside its scholarship recipients, donators and graduates. TEV strives to increase this support each year and has thus touched the lives of many successful people. At TEV, every individual works for the benefit of others. Every student who receives support from TEV dreams of one day graduating and passing along the kindness they received by supporting new students. Graduates, scholarship recipients and supporters of TEV live in many different countries around the world. The foundation gives priority to creating strong bonds between all parties involved. This, of course, is not an easy task given the sheer volume of people.
The founders of Mentorink are graduates of TEV. When forming the company, they set forth with the idea that gaining and sharing experience is not as easy as accessing information. The mentoring platform that they created brings together people who want to learn from the experience of others with people who want to volunteer their experiences to others. This is how the story of Mentorink and TEV begins. Since 2016, Mentorink brings together mentees and mentors within the TEV family through an online smart mentoring system. With the content provided by Mentorink, TEV graduates help prepare new TEV scholarship recipients to face the world and mentor them to find their directions in life. Thousands of TEV graduates in 20 different countries continue to mentor TEV scholarship recipients in 60 different cities around Turkey.
Mentorink makes it possible for a Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) academician who is a graduate of TEV to mentor a TEV scholarship recipient in a Turkish university. As such, the valuable experience of the mentors guide the mentees as their plan their lives.
Mentorink has reached out to nearly 3,500 TEV family members and as a result, helped pair up around 1,500 mentors and mentees. In recent years, the corporate donators to TEV have been added to this mentoring web as well. The employees of these companies can become mentors and have the chance to share their experiences with TEV scholarship recipients.
Mentorink is structured according to the needs of the mentors and the mentees. Therefore it moves forward with a common goal. Mentors and mentees alike are able to rate each other and contact each other easily with this fun and innovative application. There are three steps: Smart-Matching, Smart-Interactions and Smart-Assessment. Through these steps, mentees are paired up with the best mentors for their needs. These not only makes the process easier but reduces costs as well.
One of the most important global institutions in its field is the European Mentoring and Coaching Council (EMCC). In 2019, the EMCC awarded Mentorink for “Most Successful Program” in two different categories: Mentoring (for their program with TEV) and coaching (for their program with coaching) making these among the best in the world. Inspired by their collaboration with TEV, Mentorink has worked with other NGO’s and companies to achieve successful results in other different sectors and fields. https://www.emccglobal.org/about_emcc/awards/
Whether you are an NGO or a multi-national enterprise company, you can get in touch with Mentorink to share your experiences.