Introducing the CCGHR’s Stories of Mentorship

Introducing the CCGHR’s Stories of Mentorship

by the CCGHR Mentorship Project Team

With funding support from the Global Health Research Initiative, the Canadian Coalition for Global Health Research (CCGHR) has identified a number of exciting mentorship initiatives from Canada, Africa, Latin America, and the UK/Europe to strengthen global health research capacity. One or more key actors associated with each initiative were invited to join the CCGHR Mentorship Project Team and contribute a story about their program.

Our Approach to Assembling and Telling the Mentorship Stories

The team’s aim was to assemble a collection of stories, each with a different central theme. When read together, these stories would reveal a rich and detailed understanding about the practice of mentorship and about the particularities of mentorship in the context of global health research. We likened this collection of stories to an exhibit of paintings in an art gallery — an exhibit in which the project team were also the curators. Like paintings in a curated exhibit, each story would reflect or illustrate the exhibit’s overarching theme of mentorship in global health research.
The idea was not for each story to try to say everything there is to say about a particular mentorship initiative. Indeed, descriptions of several of the initiatives can be found on organizational websites, links to which are provided on the story webpages. Several of the mentorship programs have undertaken evaluations that are reported on, or will soon be reported on, in the peer-reviewed literature. We did, however, complete a descriptive table with a row for each initiative, so that we could better understand the key components of the mentorship program. Data from this table were used to create the side-bar text that accompanies each story.
Our approach seemed well-suited to the diversity of mentorship initiatives represented and the multiple “mentorship modalities” contained within each. Together the stories offer examples of mentorship practices that may be variously characterized as North to South, South to South, North to North, or South to North; face-to-face or virtual; peer-to-peer or inter-generational; one-to-one or one-to-group; and structured or organic.
Early in the project, each of the mentorship story authors identified a central theme(s) for their story and shared it with their co-exhibitors/co-curators. As each story found its own, distinct central theme(s) quite naturally, without forcing a theme to a story or story to a theme, we sensed that we were “on to something” with our approach to assembling the stories. More than being data points in a cross-case analysis, stories began to “dialogue with” and complement each other.
In developing their stories, the authors adopted a writing style that set aside a number of academic conventions and expectations around reporting on programs and initiatives, and they made themselves and/or other key actors protagonists in the story. We hoped this kind of story telling would make the stories fresh, compelling to read, and accessible to a wide audience. We also believed that this narrative style was well-suited to exploring the topic of mentorship which is fundamentally about human relationships, aspirations, engagement, trust, “opening oneself up” and changing mindsets.
As first drafts of the stories were completed, they were “hung” in a virtual “gallery” on the CCGHR website (a private version of the public space where the stories are now found). Co-exhibitors/co-curators then “wandered” about the exhibit and left comments about each other’s draft stories as well as the connections between and differences among the various stories. On the basis of these posted comments, and a story-by-story group discussion by teleconference, the authors prepared final drafts of their stories and together identified a set of emerging themes. We found the writing process highly rewarding, in the opportunity it offered for deep reflection and for learning from each other’s initiatives.

The Individual Stories

The Thirst for Mentorship in Global Health Research introduces readers to the “minefields” faced by new global health researchers and the demand for mentorship. It also provides an in-depth view of CCGHR’s work on mentorship and on strengthening its own institutional capacity. It focuses on CCGHR’s Summer Institutes and the opportunity afforded by its Facilitators-in-Training (FITs) program for leadership development within the Coalition. The story also offers important insights into what is involved in “learning to be a mentor” from the perspective of the FITs.
The Loneliness of the Long Distance Scholar tells the story of the partnership between ESE:O and the Consortium for Advanced Research Training in Africa (CARTA) to develop a 9-month distance workshop for the latter’s first cohort of PhD candidates. ESE:O is a Chilean NGO with a strong commitment to addressing the “unequal production and accumulation of knowledge” between researchers in the Global North and those in the Global South, along with expertise in conducting on-line writing workshops. The story highlights the isolation of the “long distance scholar” and the importance of being part of a community, feeling connected, and deriving support and confidence from interaction with others in like circumstances. The story also speaks to the use of technology in distance mentoring, the need to continually negotiate cultural and disciplinary expectations, to work at aligning individual and program goals, and to emphasize how mentors can learn from mentees to “get the program right.”
Wisdom Shared: Co-mentoring Relationships in Global Health Research tells the story of how a senior global health researcher at the University of Calgary and a young physician-researcher from Tanzania built a powerful co-mentoring relationship. This story illustrates how inter-generational age differences and differences in academic positions became secondary to learning from each other. The story also shows how mentoring can take place in an unplanned and “just in time” way “around crisis points, unexpected opportunities and unpredictable needs.”
In The Mentorship Cascade CCGHR’s National Co-ordinator, Vic Neufeld, describes his personal journey from young mentee in the 1970s to international mentorship consultant with the World Bank and International Clinical Epidemiology Network to a senior mentor-of-mentors. His story, like that of Raúl Mejía in Breaking New Ground and David Ndetei in Africa Mental Health Foundation (AMHF) PhD Colloquium illustrates how exceptional mentors inspire mentees to themselves become exceptional mentors and train the next generation of mentors.
Finding Success in Group Mentorship, the story of the Africa Mental Health Foundation (AMHF) PhD Colloquium, begins in a university cafeteria in Nairobi, Kenya with a group of students “overwhelmed by the task of putting together their research proposal and frustrated by the lack of support from [their] supervisors.” The narrative reveals the challenges they faced in getting this student-led peer mentoring initiative off the ground. The encouragement, support, and mentorship they received from senior African Mental Health Forum researcher, David Ndetei, was critical to the Colloquium’s success.
Breaking New Ground: The Introduction of Mentorship in a Culture Where it was Not Used for Research Development provides a complementary example of mentorship being used as a tool for strengthening both individual and institutional research capacity. In this story, the mentorship is linked to the development of a specific field of research (tobacco control) in Argentina. Like several of the other stories, it highlights how mentors themselves learn and grow professionally from the experience of mentoring and how mentorship can sometimes “bump up against” graduate study supervision or employer supervision, leading to role conflicts, misunderstandings, and opposition from supervisors.
Seize Opportunity, Build Community: CCGHR Pilot Mentorship Programs at Three Canadian Universities highlights the need within the Canadian academic community to develop networks and supports for global health research, along with CCGHR’s organizational work on mentorship at individual universities. It demonstrates what can be done with imagination and persistence, when the climate is right, to bring about change and build a community of practice.
Fostering Safe Places: A Mentorship Pilot introduces readers to a nascent group mentorship program to support new, and often isolated, global health researchers at a large, research intensive, high-income country university. The story documents the efforts of a post-doctoral researcher and a longstanding researcher-educator to build an “encouraging and supportive” community of practice in global health research. It demonstrates the importance of creating a “safe” environment where participants can “be vulnerable, say what they can’t do or don’t know how to do, share stories about some of the personally hard situations they had encountered trying to do global health research, and not be judged.”
Mentorship and Supervision describes the work of Malaria Capacity Development Consortium to “build malaria research capacity in Africa by developing the skills of individuals and by strengthening post-graduate training at its African partner institutions.” The story demonstrates how mentorship can be a complement to, and enhancement of, supervisory relationships. Mentorship is seen to involve longer-term relationships, focus on the “whole” person and personal and professional development, entail career planning, and develop “soft” skills in addition to research skills. The program’s preference for a “light touch” approach and a mentee-driven relationship highlights the importance of finding the right balance between structure and flexibility.
The Global Health Research Capacity Strengthening Program: Building a Community of Practice tells the story of how four Québec universities – Université de Montréal, McGill University, Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM) and Université Laval — worked together to establish a training program for doctoral and postdoctoral fellows dedicated to global health research. The program created a unique interdisciplinary and inter-university environment that offers trainees and mentors much-needed opportunities to mutually share information, expertise and advice. The story highlights the synergy produced by adopting complementary modalities of mentorship. Initiatives to ensure tighter collaborations with mentors from the South emerge as salient characteristics of the program. The story presents several challenges shared by other mentorship initiatives: differentiating mentorship and supervisory relationships, ensuring quality mentoring relationships across distance, maintaining contact with former mentees, and keeping communities of practice alive.
Evaluating a Mentoring Program: Traveling the Road Less Traveled recounts author Joaquin Barnoya’s personal story of becoming a mentor and his efforts to establish and evaluate a Chronic Disease Control Research Training Fellowship Program in Guatemala – one of the most challenging countries in the Americas and a country, like Argentina, without a tradition of research mentorship. The story speaks to importance evaluating program outcomes (in addition to outputs) and describes the author’s experience using a Performance Monitoring Framework (PMF), which proved particularly well suited to the challenges of evaluating mentorship programs.

Emerging Themes: Connections Between the Stories

Individually and together, what does our collection of stories reveal about mentoring relationships and programs in general? What do the stories reveal about mentorship as a key component of health research capacity strengthening to tackle problems in global public health?
Mentoring Relationships and Programs
Great mentors inspire others to become mentors. This is a key theme in a number of the stories which has particular poignancy in Breaking New Ground, Evaluating a Mentoring Program and Finding Success in Group Mentorship, in which protagonists Raúl Mejía, Joaquin Barnoya and David Ndetei, as young research trainees, received mentoring in countries with a mentoring tradition (US and UK) and later started mentoring programs in countries that lacked one (Argentina, Guatemala, and Kenya). Now recipients of their mentoring are contributing as mentors. Equally compelling are the narratives offered in Mentorship Cascade by Sheila Harms, Raúl Mejía and Fastone Goma about the mentorship they received from mentor-of mentors and “father of research leadership,” Vic Neufeld. This inter-generational cascade effect of mentoring is important in creating a critical mass of trained researchers within an organization. Several of the mentorship initiatives described in the collection of stories have made “paying it forward” an explicit expectation of the program, encouraging or requiring participants to mentor the next cohort of mentees.
Mentorship is transformative. That mentorship can be transformative of research and leadership capacity within institutions is illustrated by many of the stories, most notably by Breaking New Ground as well as the story of CCGHR’s Summer Institutes and the Facilitators-in-Training program (Thirst for Mentorship), and the Malaria Capacity Development Consortium’s story about Mentorship and Supervision.
All of the stories highlight the many benefits that accrue to mentees, among these the acquisition of new knowledge and skills, making new contacts, becoming part of a community of practice, and new publishing and career opportunities. But mentorship can also facilitate “deep learning” – the kind of learning in which seemingly disparate pieces of knowledge suddenly connect in a new and exciting way or the kind of learning where knowledge of one’s personal self is enhanced to motivate change. Both types of learning happen in the kinds of “safe spaces” described in Fostering Safe Places – environments or personal relationships where trust and mutual respect have been established and individuals are exposed to a diversity of ideas, opinions, and experiences and are willing to open themselves up and “admit we know nothing about certain things and even less about others” as do the two protagonists in Wisdom Shared. The collection of stories shows how mentorship can be transformative of careers and ways of thinking and engender a passion and commitment to mentorship itself. It also shows how mentorship requires long-term relationships and a focus on the “whole person” and hence, on personal as well as professional development.
Reciprocity. Many of the stories speak to the fact that mentoring is “a two-way street” and show how mentors themselves have learned and grown professionally from the experience of mentoring. In pointing out how his mentoring activities have boosted his own career in Breaking New Ground, Raúl Mejía offers a great antidote to those who would pigeonhole mentoring as a “soft” humanitarian activity. But it is in Wisdom Shared and Mentorship Cascade that readers are offered an intimate portrait of the reciprocity of learning and personal growth that can be found in some mentoring relationships.
Finding the right balance. A number of the stories illustrate how a particular initiative started out as one thing with a particular set of goals and then stretched, shrank, bent, blended and blossomed into something different over time. Stories like Wisdom Shared, Supervision and Mentorship and Finding Success in Group Mentorship reveal the challenges in navigating cultural and disciplinary norms and expectations as well as institutional cultures and mindsets. Other stories like The Loneliness of the Long Distance Scholar and Building a Community of Practice offer insight into the challenges of aligning individual and program goals. Still others show the importance of getting just the right mix of mentoring modalities – that is, one-to-one and one-to-group, peer-to-peer and inter-generational, “chance” and “planned” or face-to-face and virtual. Collectively, the stories demonstrate the importance of dialogue and listening to one another, of flexibility and adaptability in working through problems and “finding the right balance”.
Failure is important. Finally, several of the stories reveal that not everyone who starts the program finishes and that not all mentor-mentee pairings are a good fit. While it can be easy for program leaders who have an emotional and tremendous time investment in a mentoring initiative or particular relationships with mentees to seize on the “failures”, these stories speak to how failure can be important to “finding the right balance” and getting the program right.

Mentorship as a Key Component of Global Health Research Capacity Strengthening

Level playing fields. In The Loneliness of the Long Distance Scholar, Sebastian Brett and Soledad Falabella, turn the same equity lens that is foundational in the training of global health researchers on the community of practice itself to observe that “the unequal production and accumulation of knowledge [is] an aspect of globalization as worrying as the inequitable distribution of wealth [and disease].” They point out that disparities in both training and career opportunities exist between global health researchers in the North and in the South. Recognition of these disparities is echoed in Mentorship and Supervision, Breaking New Ground, Finding Success in Group Mentorship and Sharing Wisdom. Similarly, Thirst for Mentorship, Fostering Safe Places and Seize Opportunity, Build Community reveal inequities within Canadian universities in regard to global health researchers “achieving not only permission for, but recognition of, their global work” vis-à-vis their colleagues. Together, all of the stories speak to how mentorship is instrumental in creating level playing fields within global health research by strengthening the capacity of individuals and institutions in both the Global North and Global South. Encouraging is how many of the stories demonstrate wisdom being shared South to South (Finding Success in Group Mentorship, Loneliness of the Long Distance Scholar, Evaluating a Mentoring Program, and Breaking New Ground) and North to South (Wisdom Shared, Building a Community of Practice and Mentorship and Supervision).
Changing mindsets. Mentorship for leadership in global health research is an explicit goal of the initiatives described in Thirst for Mentorship, Building a Community of Practice, Seize Opportunity, Build Community and A Senior Mentor’s Story. Other stories in the collection describe their protagonists’ journeys from mentee to mentor to champion or leader, both in a particular field of research and in the practice of mentorship. Change is recognized in these stories as an ultimate goal of mentorship. Changing mindsets – individual and institutional – is key to creating a “culture of mentorship” that outlives funding for a particular initiative and the leadership of particular individuals. Such a goal goes hand-in-hand with the goal of creating level playing fields in empowering the next generation of global health research leaders who will influence policies, priorities and financing.
Collaboration not competition. The tension between competition and collaboration that is inherent in academia runs throughout a number of the stories in our collection. The stories speak to the heightened competition for resources, internships, jobs and career advancement (and consequently “higher stakes”) in global health research, as well as fears about ideas being stolen and threats to authority and established ways of doing things. At the same time, all of the stories celebrate collaboration and demonstrate its importance to global health research’s demand for interdisciplinary approaches, team work and creativity, particularly in resource limited contexts.