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For some background on my team's particular situation: we are one of those teams without mentors at all. We may occasionally get some parent help, but never related to engineering. For the vast majority of the time, our students work alone without adults around. For us, the downsides have been made clear: our room is often messy, and we struggle every day to get dinner and drive out to Home Depot/OSH to buy things with our own money. On the other hand, we have actually been maintaining ourselves fairly well. We are proud of the robot we have built this year, and think it will be competitive. We have strong relationships with a number of sponsors, and have, by ourselves, fundraised a comfortable budget. No one has been seriously hurt through working with metal, power tools, electronics, etc, and we have first aid ready in our room. The older members of the team have, year after year, organized numerous events to train younger members and pass down knowledge.
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We have tried hard to fix the situation. We had written a letter to be distributed in our school's newsletter. We had a parent meeting before the season started, where we asked them all if any were interested in mentoring or helping us out. We collected all their contact information, and sent out more than one email asking for parents interested in being mentors, or if any of those parents knew someone else interested in being a mentor. We had asked many faculty members at our school, as well, and they had all rejected the offer (usually because they were too busy).
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We absolutely could never survive without the parent involvement we have on our team. They have helped us with both engineering and non-engineering mentorship roles, and their contributions have been invaluable. The only downside is that they (usually) tend to "graduate" from the team when their children graduate, and so are not available as long-term participants. If you focus on parents as mentoring resources, you may face the same issue. You may get help from a parent for an average of two years. But during that time, you will have to be constantly recruiting to get new parent/mentors involved to take the place of those currently on the team that will be leaving as their children/students graduate.
Instead (or in addition) you might want to go after some corporate/professional mentors that might be able to make a longer-term commitment. You mentioned that you have strong relationships with a number of sponsors. Start there. Make sure they are fully informed about your successes from each season, and honestly show your appreciation for their support and assistance. Then use that discussion as an opportunity to ask if they want to get even more involved with your team - by having some of their employees participate as mentors. Frequently, the best results occur when you find one young, energetic engineer at the company who has some time to spare (but may not know it yet
), and can pitch in. Invite them to one of your meetings. Make it an opportunity to both show off what you have done with their sponsorship, and also let them know about what more you would be able to do with some longer-term mentorship support. Even better, invite a few representatives from your sponsors to one of your competition events. Give them a guided tour around the pits so they can see what you have already done as a team. But at the same time, subtly point out some of the other teams with direct mentoring help, and mention how that is one area where your team still needs some assistance.
-dave
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