Enhancing Culturally Responsive Mentorship in the T32 Training Environment

Harvard School Of Public Health, Boston MA

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Abstract

PROJECT SUMMARY Background: Culturally responsive mentorship acknowledges the prior experiences, socio-cultural contexts, and frames of reference that may inhibit the development of a science identity, sense of belonging and outcome expectations that are critical for the success and persistence of under-represented trainees in STEMM fields. The Harvard Education Program in Cancer Prevention and Control (5 T32 CA057711) identified enhancement of mentorship as one of its three specific aims at the time of the last competitive renewal. The Program partnered with the Center for the Improvement of the Mentored Experience in Research (CIMER) to enhance mentorship training, with the appointment of Dr. Frazier, a Principal Facilitator with CIMER, as a multiple PI of the T32. In addition, Dr. Chris Pfund, CIMER Director, joined the External Advisory Board. Over the last 2 years, the Program’s primary mentors have all undergone mentorship training using the CIMER Entering Mentoring curriculum composed of 6 core competencies. Objectives: 1) Enhance the professional development of our current trainees by creating a Sponsorship Program with our diverse and accomplished alumnae, assigning an alumnae sponsor to each of our current fellows. 2) Build the capacity for offering evidence-based mentor training by offering facilitator (leader) training of the Entering Mentoring curriculum developed by the Center for the Improvement in Mentored Experience in Research (CIMER) to our alumnae Sponsors and the rest (new mentors, secondary mentors, affiliated mentors) of our T32 mentors cohort, 3)Deepen the training of our mentors and alumni sponsors by focusing on “culturally- aware” mentorship by offering CIMER’s new Culturally Aware Mentoring curriculum. Methods: We plan to kick-off this work with a workshop on the State of the Science of Mentorship and an assessment of the current mentorship landscape within our T32. We plan to establish a Sponsorship Program for our current T32 fellows by recruiting Sponsors from our T32 Alumnae network. We will also offer Entering Mentoring to our Alumnae Network as part of establishing the Sponsorship program. We plan to increase the pool of CIMER-certified facilitators to meet the demand for mentorship training by offering training on how to facilitate (lead) the basic mentorship training course called Entering Mentoring. These trained facilitators can in turn train the rest of their research teams (dissemination). Finally, we plan to offer advanced training in “Culturally Aware Mentoring” with those from the above cohorts who have completed basic mentorship training. We will then evaluate this training program, and make plans to further disseminate it and imbed it within the institutions that comprise the DF/HCC. With this multi-tiered approach, we anticipate enhancing mentorship excellence across the entire training ecosystem of our T32.