Moving Mountains: A Strategic Plan for the Colorado Attorney Mentoring Program

 

Following a year of reflection, input from more than 100 stakeholders, and many hours of envisioning the future, the Colorado Attorney Mentoring Program (CAMP) is proud to present its 2018-2020 strategic plan. A first in the organization's history, CAMP's strategic plan reflects not only where we are today, but it provides guidance for our key priorities over the next three years.

Our strategy builds on the essential characteristics that distinguish CAMP from other attorney mentoring programs. CAMP is both a clearinghouse for sophisticated mentors and an educational program based upon professional ideals. We believe that education and mentorship reinforce each other and that the best attorney mentoring programs bring innovative coaching and relevant instruction together.

Through the implementation of four strategic commitments, we will continue to welcome and challenge independent, creative, diverse, and courageous lawyers to collaborate, innovate, learn, and explore with career-changing impact.

(1) Integrative Program Development

CAMP excels at professional development that integrates knowledge from diverse disciplines. We will build on this distinctive strength through investments in thematic areas that will engage Colorado's legal community on issues of importance to the profession now and in the future. These investments include:

a.    Cultivating Practice Readiness

b.    Integrating Wellness in Practice

c.     Creating Diverse and Inclusive Legal Communities

d.    Exploring Rural & Mountain Practice Experience

e.    Sustaining Access to Justice

(2) Strategic Partnerships

CAMP’s success is grounded in the partnerships it cultivates with Colorado bar associations, law firms, legal organizations, and law schools. We will continue to strengthen these relationships through partnerships that support professional engagement, cultivate the diversity required for excellence, enhance participants’ access to mentors and coaches, support existing CAMP partnerships, and forge new ones with organizations throughout the State of Colorado.

(3) Innovative & Wide Reaching Communications

We will reinvigorate our messaging and branding, strengthen our outreach to generate a state-wide footprint, and create robust virtual and technological initiatives that enhance the connections between current members of the CAMP community and prospective members around the state.

(4) Excellence In Relationship Building 

CAMP offers the best facilitated attorney mentoring experience available in Colorado. We will sustain CAMP’s position as a leader in creating meaningful, substantive mentoring and coaching relationships through conscious matching approaches, thoughtful mentor recruitment strategies, and innovative relationship facilitation models.

Implementing the Plan

CAMP is already taking steps to implement this innovate strategic plan.

CAMP now offers monthly programming to all participants. These presentations from Colorado's legal leaders are designed to improve professional relationship building skills, create practice readiness, inspire professionalism, and increase wellness. We also feature quarterly training designed specifically for CAMP mentees and mentors: BaseCAMP & “But I’m Not a Mentor!”

Each event is livestreamed to attorneys across the state and recordings of events are available in the newly formed CAMP video library. To view the CAMP event calendar visit coloradomentoring.org/calendar. To access the video resource library visit coloradomentoring.org/mentoring-resources/training-videos/.

CAMP has created a Partner Program Handbook available to any legal organization seeking to implement a CAMP-style attorney mentoring program in their organization or community. The handbook provides a step-by-step guide to developing and launching an attorney mentoring program. Additionally, the handbook contains a Promoting Your Mentoring Program Toolkit, containing sample flyers, social media banners, sample recruitment e-mails, participant orientation PowerPoint presentation, and an activities guide).

In an effort to modernize mentoring, CAMP has created its first Mentoring Circles. Mentoring Circles are a group of individuals with specific areas of expertise that are willing to share with the others in the circle as well as having a need to gain knowledge for themselves in topics that are areas of expertise of others. The circle participants have been brought together with a collaborative set of skills, knowledge or experiences. They play the role of both mentor and mentee, but in a more informal manner - as opposed to a one on one long-term formal mentoring relationship. CAMP is currently piloting mentoring circles with the Colorado Defense Lawyers Association and is planning future mentoring circles in cannabis law and ADR.

Finally, the CAMP 2018 Marketing & Communications Plan leverages social media and direct contact communications strategies to capture, produce and share CAMP’s mission and success stories, to promote programs, attract new participants, and inform stakeholders of CAMP’s impact. The forthcoming CAMP Listserv will allow program participants to improve collaboration around relevant mentoring topics and questions.

Overall, our plans reflect CAMP’s deep commitment to the principles of professionalism. The mentoring and coaching our participants receive equips them to be leaders in their respective fields as well as outstanding citizen lawyers. With the support of our staff, talented mentors, and committed mentees and friends, we can build on our distinction and set CAMP on a path to increasing lawyer excellence and community relevance during its next three years.