It’s National Mentoring Month, and we’ll be celebrating great mentors—and their stellar mentees—all week here at the Ideasphere with a series of posts on how to be a fantastic mentor, what mentorship can mean to the mentee and more.  Hopefully, by week’s end, you’ll be motivated to turn National Mentoring Month into National Mentoring Year.

We wanted to start by highlighting some of the impactful organizations who partner with CIW YOU(th).  As always, please share your favorite organizations in the comments.  We’re eager to learn more ways that we can positive impact our city and its youth. 

The Big Shoulders Fund offers grants to inner-city Catholic schools and scholarships to students in need.

Chicago Scholarsreceive mentoring and preparation for applying and attending college.

EMBARC designs programming that gives students the tools to lead and inspire others.  You can hear EMBARC success story and Chicago YOU(th) Ambassador Joseph Jones share his story here.

The Future Founders Foundation inspires Chicago-area students to make opportunities for themselves and be entrepreneurs.

Horizons for Youthbroadens Chicago students’ horizons through one-on-one mentoring, tutoring, cultural experiences and college and high school preparatory classes.

The Urban Alliancegives students valuable work experience.

UCAN provides mentoring and therapy to Chicago-area youth and families who have been impacted by trauma and violence.

Youth Guidancecreates innovative violence prevention programs for at-risk youth.  Indiegogo’s Slava Rubin helped one of those programs—Harper High School’s Becoming a Man (BAM) program, an after-school boxing program for at-risk teens—tap into Indiegogo’s crowdsourcing framework to raise money to fund much-needed equipment.