Using the Mentor Portal is a requirement for mentoring with Seedling.  Your Mentor Director sent you a link when you had your first visit. If you no longer have the link, simply ask your Mentor Director to resend it to you; they’ll be happy to do so. You can sign in to the mentor portal using existing Yahoo or Gmail/Google accounts. After your login has been established, you can bookmark mentorportal.net, where you can sign in and log your hours weekly. This helps us make sure we’re keeping accurate records of visits, which is essential information for our school partners as well as grant reports. Accurately reporting hours served by Seedling Mentors can go a long way to proving the scope of impact you are having across the greater Austin area!

A convenient benefit to the Mentor Portal is the home page where you can see messages from your Mentor Director, a useful tool to keep messages from being overlooked in your email. While schools ask mentors to sign in via sign-in sheets or binders, remember that those tools are specific for campus use only. Seedling tracks your mentoring visits only via the Mentor Portal.

For step by step instructions on how to use the Mentor Portal, please click here. The notes field is a good place for you to make notes of anything you’d like to remember about your visit – perhaps a prompt to bring a game that your mentee particularly enjoyed. Remember, although your Mentor Director can review these notes, they do not review Mentor Portal notes daily. If there is anything time sensitive or anything you would like to discuss with your Mentor Director regarding your match, the best way to do that is to contact them directly.

For consistency and ease of use, it’s recommended that you document your visit when you first get back to your car after you leave the campus. It only takes a minute and that way you don’t have to remember to do it once you get back to the rest of your day. The most important thing is that you remember to document your time weekly.  One minute spent updating your Mentor Portal each week helps to ensure we can keep serving children impacted by parental incarceration in Central Texas for years to come.