The Garden Initiative for Black Women’s Religious Activism is offering a nine-month peer-to-peer and intergenerational mentorship program for black women leaders across religious traditions in the United States. For this program, religious leadership includes persons in formal positions within religious traditions as well as persons who have held some position of authority or power in a religious space.
During the program senior mentors (women with over ten years leadership experience) will engage mentees (women with less than five years leadership experience) in quarterly meetings to discuss strategies for success and for overcoming obstacles they experience as religious leaders. Peer mentors and mentees will meet to create a reflective space for women with similar career experiences. In addition to providing an exchange through mentoring relationships, the mentorship program will function as a data collection site through which mentees will collect and record specific leadership strategies, definitions, and intentions shared by their mentors to identify and transfer effective techniques for social justice work and advance understanding of the longitudinal nature of effective leadership.
The mentorship program and its research will expand existing knowledge about black women’s leadership and add to knowledge about leadership in general, including uncovering successful social justice strategies and narratives about the unfolding realities of leadership competency and success. The Garden Initiative’s peer-to-peer mentorship program presents a unique opportunity to advance and develop black women’s leadership skills. The mentorship program will consist of engagements of 10 mentors and 10 research mentees. Mentors also will be subjects of oral histories. Mentoring will not occur across religious traditions.
The Program Is Off To A Great Start
On July 21-23, 2023, the Garden Initiative hosted its first mentoring gathering of sixteen black women religious leaders in Atlanta, GA. Six Buddhists, two African traditionalists, one new thought, and seven Christian women mentors and mentees participated in the meeting. During our first meeting, we explored social justice strategies for leadership success that are relevant across traditions.
