Mentor Mums CIC

Hello friends and advocates of parent friendly workforces!

I’m Annie, the founder of Mentor Mums. We're looking to raise £2,500 to help make our FREE mentoring programme available to as many people as possible in 2025.

What is Mentor Mums?

In short, we’re a small but mighty not-for-profit that matches parents with parent mentors from their world of work to support their return to work after leave. Our mentors act as a sounding board and sharing their own advice based on their lived experience, around issues ranging from ‘overcoming postnatal mental health challenges’, to ‘making sure I’m not overlooked for promotion’ or ‘presenting a kick-ass business pitch on three hours’ sleep’!  

Mentor Mums started life in 2020, as a tiny voluntary service inspired by Annie’s own return to work and the experiences of friends. The programme saw huge demand quickly, showing just how great the need was for support for returning parents.

We quickly assembled a volunteer team and recruited mentors, and we’ve since supported hundreds of mentee returners back to work, for absolutely no fee.

We are now trying to develop into a more sustainable entity, building a client base of workplaces that benefit from our wisdom and insights through in-house workshops or consultancy. But we don’t want to pause our mentoring programme while we focus on winning new business – that’s why we need your help.

We are passionate about:

✧ Bridging the support gap between becoming a parent and resuming a professional role 

✧ Striving for equity by addressing the gender pay gap, the authority gap and the ‘missing rung’ on the managerial ladder (McKinsey, Women in the Workplace, 2024) that is often exacerbated for birthing people 

✧ Harnessing the power of mentoring – a form of skilled volunteering that results in huge social value

Meet the Team 

We’re a small team, already making a big impact:

• Annie, the Founder
• Amy, our Client Manager
• Jen, our Volunteer Match Coordinator
• David, the Tech Whizz
• Our hundreds strong team of incredible volunteer mentors – who offer bespoke support to their mentees, and often advocate for us as an org across socials and in their workplaces

With a strong background in the charity sector, our founder Annie has always had a heart for solving the issues she sees in the world. Creating a peer-led mentoring programme around the working parenthood challenge felt like a no brainer when she became a mum.

However it’s only since Mentor Mums has grown and expanded has it become clear just how many barriers still exist for working parents – around employment rights, mental health support, childcare costs or gender inequity.

Now Annie is mum to an 8 year old, 3 year old and 1 year old and is still averaging five hours sleep, so is very much a founder that is connected to the mission, and has plenty of lived experience!

The team bring their parenting and professional experience too, which includes baby loss, perinatal mental health experience and more. Together with our mentors we share a desire to see, hear and hold the mentees returning to work and guide them through the squelchy mud back to a manageable work-life balance.

Why are we crowdfunding?

So far we have invested a fair amount of time, love and money into our flagship mentoring programme, and developing our corporate products, but now we need your help to take the next step.

In 2025 our goal is to work with more corporate clients to improve their workplaces which helps to fix the issues for returners upstream, and to generate enough income for our not-for-profit mentoring service. While we’re working on this new income generation, we’d really benefit from extra capacity to keep the mentorship programme on track.

If we hit our target of £2500 we can cover the administrative cost of 50 matches, helping 50 returners thrive in their work and home lives. 

Thank you for taking the time to read this far and consider backing us. We have seen just how much impact we can make at a low cost, but we can’t keep offering a free service without you, and we huge vision for the future.