District Support for Pathways
You use Pathways as a member but are not involved in its administration. However, you are expected to support those who are, so here’s what you need to know.
Table of Contents for This Page
Learning how to use Pathways
This is not really about learning, its about the confidence understanding the basics brings. The very best way you can help a member is to promote one on one sessions with the help of a mentor, because what the member is really learning is Pathways’ “process cycle”. Second best is to become familiar with the Pathways Tutorial Index and realise that the video resources are, essentially, table topics – not long sessions. You can help by emphasising they are there to both inform and to spark questions.
The best way you can help a club is to suggest they send new or uncertain members to our “Onboarding” sessions, held towards the end of each month. They are as much forums for existing members as they are starting points for new ones.
The Special “Pathways Mentor”
There is indeed a module on mentoring in the Pathways programme and it is well worth doing; you will be a better mentor as a result. The bad news is that very same module can put people off mentoring because:
- Its not available until you have completed the first two levels of a path
- It takes about a year to complete because of the length of the mentoring projects
- It is not conferred until you have completed a path
Therefore, since Pathways was introduced in late 2017, only about 25 awards have been conferred (to December 2021). There is a wide misconception that you need this in order to be a mentor. Not true. If a member has finished a level, they can mentor others through that level.
Where the mentoring programme comes in useful is that anyone who is recognised as a mentor has done the transition between levels 3 and 4, which appears on the list of frequently asked questions as a hard thing to do. Anyone who is recognised as a mentor in theory needs to have contributed their upper level project visions on the “Share my Project” page.
Other Resources
Its your turn. Both the Members and Club Officers sections of this website have Pathways and Resources pages, which you need to be familiar with. District Officers, however, have very little outside the District Leadership Handbook and the District Leader Tools page that contains it (in the District Leader Kit).
Is there anything related to Pathways (apart from what’s in the above) you would like to see here because it is likely to be useful to you and your successor? If so, please contact our Webmaster to get it added.