Last quarter Reps council working with Participation Team begun to work in changes on the Rep program, one of them was to start new Reps Mentors work. I wrote about this project before, if you are interested in this part of the history.
We just end the first cohort training, with 11 new mentors and 1 from the existing mentors group. And now, they are working with their mentees, something that let us welcome new Reps again. We select 20 people from the list of applicants, and we ask for more patience to the people that still have their applications pending.
What we have done
The training is a mix of readings and live calls. We create a guide that compile information from books and blog post from different resources, and in the live calls, we discuss that content and had some exercises to practice the learnings.
This training last for one month and a half, and just before ending it, I had conversations with all the new Reps mentors to have feedback on the training, and which things needs to be modified. The main concern was that the training seems unstructured and sometimes they weren’t sure about what we were requesting from them.
Now, they begun to work with their mentees, having their first interviews, helping them to identify their goals in the near future, building their path inside the community. And with the creation of the Review Team, these Coach don’t need to review budget and swag request for them. Just focus on their personal development and how they could be even more useful for their communities.
But, one of the main questions that we still have is: how we can measure the utility and usage of this training? How can we know that Mentors are using these techniques and if these are useful for them in their work with the mentees?
If you have ideas, please let us know 
What we will do in the near future
This week we started the second cohort of the project. This time, we focus on existing Mentors, rather than new ones. We made a call for applications and now we have 12 new candidates, that will begin their training soon.
This training will have more structure, and more exercises. Also, we will be opening the training for Reps (not Mentors) to bring these tools to more people. And we are preparing a second version of the website, that will be available for everyone that want to read it.
We will be using the last part of this quarter to discuss how to continue this project in 2017. Our idea is that with all this people trained, we could scale faster (with more people helping on giving training and updating content and resources).