Great Lakes opens its 2026 mentorship cohort

A staff member six months into her first association job spends an hour a month across a café table from someone who's run a member organization for two decades. That's the shape of the Great Lakes chapter's mentorship program, whose 2026 cohort opens for applications this month, with pairings beginning in March.

The Great Lakes Mentorship Program Guide sets out the chapter's criteria for matching mentors and mentees: pairings run 12 months, cover staff new to association management rather than any particular job title, and are drawn from across the chapter's member organizations rather than paired within the same one.

Chapter Chair Priya Ranganathan, who also serves as deputy executive director at the Great Lakes Orchard Growers Association, said the program grew out of a recurring complaint at the chapter's monthly roundtable — that staff new to association work had nowhere to ask basic questions without feeling like they were exposing a gap in their organization's leadership.

"You can't ask your own executive director whether you're supposed to know something," Ranganathan said. "A mentor from a different organization gives you somewhere to ask that isn't your own reporting line."

Mentees are typically staff in their first two years of association management, regardless of title, while mentors are drawn from executive directors, deputy directors, and senior program staff across the chapter's member organizations, which range from a two-person shipping association to an 11,000-member education association.

Roughly a third of last year's mentee cohort held titles below "director" for the first time in the program's history, a shift Ranganathan attributed to more small associations sending their sole junior staffer rather than only their department heads.

Pairings meet monthly for the full 12-month cycle, typically for an hour, covering whatever the mentee brings — a board relations question one month, a budget process the next. The chapter doesn't script the conversations or require written reports from either party.

• Mentees commit to the full 12 months and to coming with real questions rather than treating the meetings as a formality

• Mentors commit to monthly availability, not daily accessibility

• Pairings are matched by the chapter office, not self-selected, based on sector and stated interests from the application

Ranganathan said the chapter reviews match quality informally at the six-month mark and has occasionally re-paired a mentee whose original mentor left an association mid-cycle, though outright mismatches have been rare.

Applications for the 2026 cohort close in early March, with pairings announced shortly after and the first meetings expected before the end of the month. Ranganathan said the chapter has never had to turn away a qualified mentee for lack of available mentors, though it has occasionally had to recruit mentors from outside the Great Lakes chapter's own roster when a particular sector wasn't represented among that year's volunteers.

For an early-career staffer weighing whether to apply, Ranganathan's advice is blunt: "If you're already asking yourself whether you're too junior for this, you're exactly who it's for. The people who wait until they feel senior enough usually don't need the mentor by the time they finally apply."