The Village: Infrastructuring Community-based Mentoringto Support Adults Experiencing Poverty

Mentorship and other social and relational support have been vital to poverty alleviation and transformative change. It is crucial to understand the underlying factors in the success of mentoring models and subsequent programs to support them. Thus, we conducted a mixed-methods study consisting of longitudinal surveys of community participants followed by semi-structured interviews with 28 community members, eight mentors, and two coaches participating in a community-based mentorship program. Drawing from community-based participatory research in partnership with a nonproft located in a Midwestern United States (U.S.) city, we unpack how the program supported self-sufciency and economic mobility among adults experiencing fnancial hardships. Through an infrastructural lens, we attend to individuals’ infrastructuring work in social support, fexibility, and trust to support a “village” model of community-based mentorship. Our results show how the village model difers from traditional mentorship models that assume dyadic, one-to-one, often didactic, and hierarchical relationships (e.g., expert and protégé, adult and child) and are used primarily in the workplace and educational settings. The village mentorship model advocates for less hierarchical and more balanced relationships in non-institutional settings and fexible communication and technological needs. We discuss new research opportunities and Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for proft or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the frst page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specifc permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from permissions@acm.org. CHI ’22, April 29-May 5, 2022, New Orleans, LA, USA © 2022 Copyright held by the owner/author(s). Publication rights licensed to ACM. ACM ISBN 978-1-4503-9157-3/22/04. . . $15.00 https://doi.org/10.1145/3491102.3501949 Earnest Wheeler School of Information, University of Michigan Ann Arbor, USA earnestw@umich.edu design strategies for rethinking technology-mediated mentorship to support poverty-stricken adults in the U.S.