At the last general meeting, we were fortunate to be addressed by Ms Colleen D’Offay about the exciting relatively new Mentor Watch. Collen is a member of RC Brighton and until recently was Head of Client Success – Public and Enterprise Service at Ascender, Melbourne. She is now involved in this exciting adventure. The original guest speaker Domenic Saporito couldn’t appear since his children have covid and even though he was negative our President couldn’t allow our members one bit of anxiety in a possible infection with COVID, so we were lucky to have Collen to step in on one day’s notice.
President Teresa, Speaker Colleen D'Offay
& PP Mark Ellis
She described how a partnership had been formed between Outcome.life, Study Melbourne and Rotary Districts of Melbourne, with the sole purpose of building confidence in some of the Victoria’s 200,000+ International Students.
The Victorian Government recognises that International Students bring $137,000,000 into the economy and supply up to 80,000 employment opportunities. There is awareness of the isolation and lack of information available for seeking by the students. They want to increase not just the sociability but employability of the International Students. The idea is to match culture, location, sex and interests. There had been pilot programs to gain an idea of how to run this on a bigger scale. Importantly, it is up to the individual to identify themselves to join.
Mentor Match promises to be a major new Vocational Service Project for our club. 