I can really see your point and thank you for sharing your experience. With the advance of technology, connections can be so much broader and over distance. In many ways, this has been most of my experience with Rosa. However, when she and I sat down together in person, that was what knit our hearts together.

I suppose it is possible to mentor from a distance but face to face still outshines any other method, in my opinion. I believe ongoing mentoring can be done at a distance, if face to face is not possible. But, I think I would try to recruit on-site mentors as much as possible. Of course, in a school setting, for which this was written, face to face is the norm.

Thanks again for your comments; I am so grateful to you for your participation.

In the mentor program I was associated with, we started with only local and therefore face-to-face connections. It worked very well. There was demand for expansion as more folks wanted to take part. We did expand to allow cross-site connections where face-to-face meetings were not realistic on a regular basis. The program still worked. Some of the developments within the pairs took a little longer to get to the trust point but they did get there. We did not keep stats on how long this took. The anecdotal evidence from our surveys (both comments and ratings) do bear this out. Video connections are a plus over plain phone connections. Clearly the body language and facial view is an important addition to the distance relationship.

So while it may be harder to pull this off from a distance, I wouldn’t say it is not possible. Anything is possible when two folks get together and want to make the relationship work.