Our purpose at EmbrACE is to give female undergraduate students at Vanderbilt University the opportunity to regularly mentor middle school girls in the Nashville area on issues relating to age and gender.
The topics for lesson plans relate to: maintaining a positive self-image, building healthy relationships, setting goals and working towards accomplishing them, and making a meaningful impact on one’s community. As an organization, our goals are to:
1) Provide girls in grades 5-8 with passionate, reliable, and knowledgeable college mentors
2) Advocate for the support and empowerment of young girls in disadvantaged communities
3) Challenge the unreasonable expectations for women and girls in contemporary society.
The capitalized ACE in our name is an all-encompassing acronym for Aspire, Care, and Empower.
If you are interested in becoming a mentor, here are the requirements:
- Any Vanderbilt University undergraduate student who identifies as female may apply to become a mentor for EmbrACE, and she will be accepted as long as she is compliant with all membership requirements detailed in this Article.
- All mentors must be compliant with Vanderbilt University’s Protection of Minors (POM) requirement by completing the module or renewing their training before the deadline every year. Mentors may not join the Anchor Link roster or begin attending sessions until they are compliant with POM.
- All mentors must submit the background check form provided by the school they will be mentoring at no later than two weeks before the first mentoring session. If a mentor joins late, they may not begin mentoring until at least two weeks after they have turned in the background check form. Background check forms are valid for the entire school year, unless requested more often by a particular school, so they typically need only be completed in the beginning of every Fall semester unless a mentor joins in the Spring or decides to mentor at a different school in the Spring than they mentored at in the Fall.
- Mentors may miss no more than three mentoring sessions per semester, including the sessions they may have missed before joining EmbrACE, otherwise their membership will be suspended until the start of the next semester. They will be sent a warning email after missing two sessions and a notification of suspension after missing three sessions.
Contact our President, Nicole Baptista at nicole.g.baptista@vanderbilt.edu or our Vice President, Alexis Finnell at alexis.c.finnell@vanderbilt.edu if you would like to get involved with embrACE.