National Mentorship Programme

The world isn’t always the easiest place to be a girl: our brains are often hardwired to see each other as competition, instead of seeing each other as a cheerleader. The Shona Project (TSP) believes in the power of girls supporting girls, and particularly established women supporting the younger generation. 

Mentorship plays a huge part in every aspect of TSP. You don’t think we got to where we are today by just winging it? Nope, our whole team is mentored by an army of experienced people, who support and guide us on the things that we don’t know, because newsflash… we don’t know everything, and we never will. 

The tricky thing that we have come to notice is that our young women struggle to identify positive role models, and find the opportunity to access and build a relationship with someone who they can call a mentor. Recognising that more support is needed, we at The Shona Project are now recruiting for year three of our National Mentorship Programme.

This programme is designed for senior cycle secondary school girls who are seeking positive role models and career inspiration, and to benefit women in the workforce who wish to develop their mentoring skills and to share their knowledge with the next generation. 

During the 9 month programme, girls will be paired up with women who work with our amazing corporate partners. Our mentees will meet monthly online with their mentors, giving them the chance to receive focused support and build trusting relationships with inspirational working women.

On top of this, our girls will take part in three tailored Shona workshops facilitated by the fab Shona team!

By the end of the programme, we hope to have given the girls:

Increased understanding of career options, journeys, and experiences of women in the workplace;

Increased resilience to stress, challenges, and negativity;

Increased career aspirations and an expanded network of career support;

Increased feelings of self-worth;

Increased confidence to find and implement solutions;

Increased agency to create change, embrace opportunities and achieve full potential;

Increased confidence to find and implement solutions.

Our mentorship Programme even made it to RTÉ’s News2Day!

Check out our September 2024 pairing event in action…

None of the work this year 2025/26 would have been possible without the time and support generously given by our corporate founding partners. We are extremely grateful to CBRE,  Allianz, Fitzgerald Power, Aer Lingus and Enterprise Mobility for helping us to launch this year’s Mentorship Programme. 

The National Mentorship Programme 2025/26 is proudly supported by

Big Ideas,
Real Impact

We were delighted to be internationally recognised by Mentorloop as one of their Most Impactful Mentoring Programmes for 2025. Check out our article here.

FAQs

  • We welcome conversations with potential corporate partners! Please reach out to info@shona.ie to find out more!

  • Year 1 (2024/25) and Year 2 (2025/26) are pilot years to ensure we have ironed out all the kinks and are ready to scale! So this means we have kept our cohort of schools small.

    If you’d like to discuss getting involved next year, please reach out to education@shona.ie and one of the team will be in touch!

  • We encourage schools to nominate girls who believe they would benefit from a mentoring relationship.

    The girls are in senior cycle (4th - 6th year) of secondary school.

    We put a particular focus on schools in hard-to-reach areas, and 3 out of our 5 schools on the 2025/26 programme are DEIS schools.