How to be a Lifeboat Mentor

Created by Ronnie Gelman, Modified on Tue, 19 Sep, 2023 at 4:03 PM by Ronnie Gelman

We're trying to build a different kind of support network for folks who are just coming to terms with the extent of the challenges we're facing, and that's why we're looking for people who are a bit further down the road who can provide support and perspectives.

We've created a process for lifeboat building that we hope is easy to explain to folks no matter where they are starting. We define a lifeboat as a personal, place-based (i.e. local) resilience network. We introduce the system in our "DIY Lifeboat Builder" 60 minute webinar, which lays out a 5-step process:

Assess and map your current social network
Invite interested folks to a conversation
Brainstorm short, sharp and shiny projects that you can start to work on together
Run the projects as an experiment
Periodically reflect on progress and refine next steps. (And repeat from Step 3)

Each step has a "deep dive" webinar that provides people with the "how to" information to complete each step, along with templates that make it as easy as possible.

Lifeboat builders are then invited to regular navigation sessions. Navigation sessions are 90-minute Zoom calls that use a circle process to give people space to talk about their current challenges in building their lifeboats / running their experiments to eventually work out the "so what" - what are the next steps to try to move things forward.

As a mentor, your primary role is co-hosting one or two regular navigation sessions, and forwarding any main themes or questions that come up. To get started, please sign up for a navigation session here as a participant, and after that we can set up some times for you to co-facilitate and then eventually facilitate on your own.

Other ways to get involved:

learning to present the webinars we've developed
providing personal coaching to lifeboat builders
helping to problem-solve special challenges that come up on the Resilience Help Desk.

You get to decide how involved you'd like to be.

If you haven't already signed up to be a Lifeboat Mentor, send us an email: friends@lifeboat.academy.