“I’ve never had a woman who took me by the hand and said ‘Mary, you have a lot of potential. Let me help you get there.’ It drives me to be that person for others. I want to be that champion for women and the underdogs.” ― Mary Bui-Pham, VP, operations and Chief of Publisher Products at Yahoo

One aspect of NEWIEE that I appreciate deeply is that its members come together looking to help elevate their peers and the next generation of women leaders in the energy and environment space – reflected in the NEWIEE commitment to “explore new solutions to today’s challenges while helping to cultivate female leadership and advancement through collaboration, inspiration and professional development.”

A core aspect of NEWIEE’s work in accomplishing that is our acclaimed Mentorship Program, that we are sustaining in this virtual era, recognizing that the COVID-19 era poses extra challenges for many working women. NEWIEE’s Mentorship Program is continuing with both its Circle Events and online Matchups. A recent Mentoring Circle event, “Working Toward a Better Normal: A Generational Discussion,” was a virtual event on November 5^th 2020, and we will continue to host virtual Mentoring Circle events in the coming months – stay tuned!

At this moment, we are launching the next phase of NEWIEE’s highly successful Matchups mentor-mentee pairing program, building on the 2-year pilot of this program. This will operate in a similar way to our prior Matchups program, with a few small tweaks to improve it even further! Here is how you can participate, either as a mentor or a mentee.

This month, NEWIEE is recruiting women mentors – we seek to create a cohort that includes women with a variety of career paths (e.g., women in the trades, engineering, energy development, sales, energy policy, environmental) as well as a racially diverse group. As in prior rounds, mentors will commit to being available to meet (virtually) at least once/month over a six month period. After six months, the mentor and mentee may choose to continue if they wish, but there is no assumption that their commitment goes beyond six months.

In March, we will list mentors with short bios on our website, and will invite potential mentees to complete a short application that describes who their top two choices of mentor would be and what they hope to learn from them. Based on that information, NEWIEE will create mentor-mentee pairs, and will launch the interactions with guidance for the participants to follow. We will reach out for feedback from both mentors and mentees at the end of the six months.