Mentoring young students with intellectual disabilities is the challenge taken on by around 70 volunteers, employees of important companies, who collaborate with the CAMPVS higher education programme of the Carmen Pardo-Valcarce Foundation and who, for their part, receive support and training at the Escuela Europea de Coaching.
In a second meeting with the volunteers, held recently in Madrid, the EEC focused on resolving the volunteers" common doubts in their work as mentors and on training them to give and receive appropriate feedback. A skill which, in the opinion of Alicia Morales, coach and trainer at the EEC and in charge of giving the training to the volunteers, is ”a skill that every mentor should develop and which is also useful for other areas of life".
Thus, the volunteers worked on some golden rules of personal communication in order to know how to give feedback without generating "discomfort, which is the most common feeling if it is not done well”, explains coach Alicia Morales. This skill allows them to strengthen their relationship with young people with disabilities, whom they try to bring closer to the world of business through mentoring.
“I think these keys help me to improve my communication with the young person and with other people”, said some volunteers about these notions, which the EEC usually trains with executives. At the meeting, the volunteers also shared experiences and evaluated their way of approaching the relationship with the student.
Among the companies that collaborate with the Carmen Pardo-Valcarce Foundation, and therefore promote the participation of their employees in the CAMPVS project, are LVMH Perfumes & Cosmetics, AON, Fundación Mahou-San Miguel, Banco Popular and Fundación Vodafone España. The programme has the academic support of IE Business School, the technological collaboration of Fundación Accenture, MDTEL and IBM, and the support of the companies Globalvia, Indra, Colt Technology, Grupo Vips, Leroy Merlin, Cisco, Bankinter, Ecoembes and CBRE.
The Mentoring programme started in January and ends at the end of June.
