Task Force Background

The idea for a Task Force on Mentoring came from the Women's Caucus for Political Science (WCPS) but was expanded into an umbrella mentoring program that could be extended to include other groups which had been subjected to discrimination and thus might have special needs.  A group of volunteers -- including Susan Clarke, Sue Davis, Valerie Martinez-Ebers, Ron Schmidt, Katherine Tate, Martha Ackelsberg, Judith Baer, Gayle Binion, and Kristen Monroe -- formed an ad-hoc committee that drafted a proposal that was submitted to the APSA Council in April of 2002. The Council asked this ad-hoc committee to respond to certain questions and then approved the idea of a Task Force at the September (2002) meeting.

Mentoring Program Proposal

The APSA Task Force that was approved at that meeting proposed a  mentoring program on a three-year trial basis. The mentoring program was designed to focus on the particular needs of women, and was to be administered in conjunction with the Women's Caucus for Political Science (WCPS). 

The original proposal conceptualized this mentoring program as part of a broader umbrella mentoring that was to be expanded to include African-Americans and Latinos if and when the relevant caucuses made formal request to be included in the program. Such requests have now been made and with an intention to structure the mentoring program to work closely with the WCPS, the Black Caucus and the Latino Caucus, as well as to establish ties to more traditional mentoring currently being done in the sections or the regional associations. (The Task Force itself has at least one member who belongs to each of these caucuses.) One of the main concerns was to create a program that can provide the kind of general professional advice and support that is the heart of mentoring for all political scientists, while still responding to the special needs of women and minority groups whose situations entail special needs as a result of past discrimination.

In constructing the mentoring program, we tried to address these concerns:

• Why Begin With a Focus on Women and People of Color?
  
• Why Mentoring? 
  
• How Should Mentoring Work?
  
• Funding and Fundraising 
  
• Program Evaluation