Role models matter and finding a mentor similar to your background is hard! Muslamic Makers is a global community of Muslim change makers, working in and around the technology scene and our community is keen to give back. Being mentored by someone who looks like you and understands the cultural nuances really matters, so we wanted to bring our amazing community into the forefront and make it easy for them to give back.
The Muslim community is great at giving financially but we want to empower people and make it easy for them to knowledge share and give in time.
Abu Huraira reported: The Messenger of Allah, peace and blessings be upon him, said, “Take up good deeds only as much as you are able, for the best deeds are those done regularly even if they are few.”
With the Mentorpreneur platform, we hope that with people simply opening up 30 minute slots once a week or once a month, they can give back consistently.
How we built Mentorpreneur
Back in October we hosted an event to re-energize the community and make it more community driven.
One of the ideas that came from it was about mentoring and it was an initiative driven by the community. It started off as a very basic form that led to a shareable spreadsheet, which simply gave people access to other people in our community who were happy to be contacted and mentor. As we were sharing email addresses, we kept it internal to the slack community but it worked really well.
Spreadsheets however get really clunky. Therefore, we took some code from the cross government prayer room github, built by one of our colleagues and fellow MM member Dilwoar, which was a google sheets backend with some UI on the top and I asked Zahid from the Muslamic Makers team to work his developer magic.
Zahid very quickly turned it around into a nice website where you can search by tag and find the email of any of the mentors to contact.
I then saw the Mega Mentor platform launch, which was simply about making design mentors accessible to everyone by letting people book in time with them through a calendar link.
I was really inspired by them and after having a conversation with them, we decided that with just a few little tweaks we could also bring Muslim mentors to the forefront.
Just before we were about to launch, however, Google had changed their API and it broke! With a little support from Dilwoar, Zahid managed to save it by re-building the script through the Google Cloud platform, saving me the time in manually uploading profiles to our wordpress website! Now, when someone fills in the mentor form, it automatically gets added to the site after we approve it.
Try it:
We have 20 mentors already on the platform from a diverse range of backgrounds!
The site is a basic MVP but with this we can test, iterate and gather user feedback to re-launch something a bit more sturdy with a better user experience in the future. We’re keen to create impact straight away.
Just go to Mentorpreneur. Simply scroll through our list of mentors, or use the filter, and book in a chat with someone you’d like to have an interesting conversation with.
Become a mentor:
- Fill in this form
- Please create an account in calendly and select your available slots. We recommend at least 30 minutes slots. This could be once a month or once a week. Up to you! Pick your favourite platform to use for your meeting and put the link in the form.
- Once filled, we’ll add your details to our open platform and you’ll start getting people booking in time for a chat.
Mentorpreneur is a prime example of working with the community, using open source code to launch something really fast to create impact straight away.
We’re always keen to hear feedback or if you’re interested to help us build this out then
Drop team@muslamicmakers.com an email.
