IBPOC Mentorship Program
The IBPOC (Indigenous, Black, People of Colour) Mentorship Program provides mentorship for Midwifery Education Program (MEP) students who self-identify as Indigenous, Black and People of Colour.
The program facilitates mentorship pairings between IBPOC students and midwives at various stages of their careers. The program matches mentors and mentees based on preferences for shared language, culture, heritage, geography or identity. Mentorship pairs are encouraged to communicate by social media, phone or in person on a weekly or monthly basis.
The benefits include:
- Professional/career development
- Resource sharing
- Mutually and culturally satisfying emotional support
- Academic support (e.g., tips, drills, learning strategies)
Share Your Feedback
If you've already participated in our program, your feedback is valuable! Please consider participating in our evaluation process for midwifery mentors and student mentees.
Contact Us
- SPARK at USCF (external link)
- Before we can learn something new...how do we Rest from Fight, Flight & Freeze Vagal Protective Responses?
- Exploring Ancestral Connections
- Woke Docs! IBPOC Supports, Rounds & More@UCSF! (external link)
- MiMentor. Together We Lead - Black Lives Matter (external link)
- MiMentor. Together We Lead - Social Justice & Diversity (external link)
- Social Justice as Midwives Change agents in Camden (external link)
- Overcoming Imposter Syndrome and Other Stressors
- Successfully Managing a Human Rights Conflict
- Orienting Yourself to a New Practice
- Life On Call: Getting Paged by Someone Else’s Client [video]
- Winnie Poon’s Peer Review on Informed Choice Discussions [video]
- Applying for Awards Using AwardSpring
- Instructions Applying for Awards at Toronto Metropolitan University [webinar] (external link)
- Best Tips for Learning Online
- You are Not Alone. Internationally midwives look just like you! (external link)
The information that is provided in mentor and mentee applications remains completely confidential and is stored on Toronto Metropolitan University’s Google Drive in a password protected, encrypted folder.
Only the mentorship team has access to the drive and uses this information at your request for pairing based upon the characteristics you choose. The mentorship team currently comprises Karline Wilson-Mitchell, director, Midwifery Education Program and Housne Begum, senior research associate and administrator.
We don’t share all of your demographic information with your midwife or student partner; we only share the details that you request we share.
Potential Conflict of Interest Clause
You may wonder what to do if you are a mentor and your mentee is assigned to you for precepting during a clinical placement.
The wisest course of action would be to:
- Discontinue your mentorship role and continue solely in the preceptor or student role.
- Notify the mentorship team so that we might find a new mentor for the student.
This approach presents the right optics and appearance of fairness. This action prevents any risk of conflict of interest.
Preceptors require keen assessment and evaluation skills and a dedication to excellence that is not hampered by sentimentality.
If a practice assigns a student to someone in the practice where their mentor works, the existing mentor may continue in the mentorship role.
There are rare cases where a midwife mentor may work on the same team or shared call rotation group as their mentee, without directly supervising them. This does not inherently pose a conflict of interest. In this case, the practice may or may not decide to accept the student mentee in that team. It is rare, however, that a practice will not accept a IBPOC student for placement.
A student mentee who temporarily loses a mentor when they become a preceptor could experience a sense of loss with this change. However, they have the opportunity of gaining a second life-long, career-long friend and support system.