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Mentoring with Morgan Stanley thanks to Inspiring Scotland’s Specialist Volunteer Network

Late last year we announced the launch of an exciting Specialist Volunteering Network (SVN) mentorship programme with Morgan Stanley Glasgow’s Women in Tech (WiT) working group.

Six months, 12 matches, and nearly 60 mentoring hours later, we came together again at Morgan Stanley’s Waterloo St office to celebrate the graduation of cohort one’s mentees.

The mentoring partnerships are not all necessarily concluded, with some matches agreeing to continue the relationship, and the WiT team supporting a further seven matches with their own charity partners.

Here’s what Rik Hodgson – Community Shed Manager with North Edinburgh Arts, an Inspiring Scotland Link Up charity partner – had to say about his mentor match with Aileen Aitken – Vice President of Enterprise Tech and Services at Morgan Stanley:

“I work for the North Edinburgh Community Shed and this year the Shed has moved from a very large location to a very small one. All moves are fraught with difficulties, especially for community projects. During this transition there were a lot of moving parts which needed my attention, such as ensuring staff felt empowered by the move, regular service users weren’t alienated and making sure we were able to successfully move into a space which was much smaller than our previous location.

 

There have been times when I have needed to be strong to cope with all these demands, and to keep everyone happy and motivated. I could not have achieved this without the direct support from Aileen. She has provided me with a dispassionate listening ear, quality advice, reassurance, strength to carry on, and on more than one occasion a friendly face on my laptop.

I would like to express my enormous gratitude to Aileen and to MS for supporting this programme. I feel more confident, more engaged, more in control, more willing to challenge things that need challenging. I have grown as a person, and as a manager.”

With the offer of support too good to refuse, Tommy Seymour, who you may recognise as one half of our SVN team requested a mentor and was paired with Jenna Page – a Scrum Master from Morgan Stanley. He said:

“Despite coordinating many mentoring and coaching relationships through the SVN, this was my first as a mentee!

It was so much more than I expected or could hope for. Jenna was keen to understand the challenges of my role, and from there, we were able to find software we both could access, and thanks to Jenna’s expertise and skillset, we’ve been able to build a data-visualisation dashboard to support operational and strategic elements of the SVN service itself.”

As Glasgow Morgan Stanley’s WiT and the SVN team look forward, we are exploring new ways to connect a fantastic team to Scotland’s third sector, with plans to offer a skills development day for victims and survivors of domestic abuse and support organisation staff in Edinburgh later this summer.

An enormous thank you to our WiT friends at Morgan Stanley and our partner charity mentees… watch this space!

If you are interested in exploring a corporate partnership or bespoke support initiative with the SVN, the team would be delighted to chat with you. Contact tommy@inspiringscotland.org.uk to start the conversation or visit the SVN page.