I’m interested in the long term sustainability of FIRST robotics as a community wide problem. I believe that the biggest piece of the puzzle is adult mentor involvement. While I admit that financial resources and student engagement loom large among other major factors, the simple fact remains. Competent and committed adult volunteer mentors are what make this program work.
My team is located in a resource rich environment, located directly next to a national lab with thousands of STEM professionals. Over the last two years with M’Aiken Magic, I have asked over 13 adult professionals to attend a team meeting and consider volunteering. Of those 13, I have had 5 attend and give it a shot. The longest one lasted on a 6 hr./wk. commitment for 3 weeks before they told us they needed to step back completely. The second runner up was involved on a single 3 hr. meeting per week schedule for a grand total of 2 weeks. Many who were initially contacted either ghosted or declined.
My fellow coaches and I are hesitant to stand up new FRC teams because we are already aware of the commitment required to sustain a quality educational experience for our students. When we already struggle to recruit new mentors into less demanding roles, how can we expect to find “The One” for a new team down the road from us? How much wasted effort is exhausted every time a core individual decides the burden is too much and closes up shop without a successor?
Assuming the sustainability of FIRST is dependent on a strategy to recruit and retain new volunteer mentors, I want to start a conversation to better understand the mentor problem. My goal for this thread is to help me to develop an effective survey. I’d like to use this survey to poll mentors at South Carolina district events in order to understand trends local to my community and understand how different teams experience the mentor problem. My hope is to then use this data to develop a region specific strategy for South Carolina for sustainable growth through increased volunteer mentor participation.
At this point, I’m interested in input from the entire FIRST community, not just S.C. These question prompts are just to start the conversation, don’t feel obliged to address them all. If there are more points that can be added to the dialogue, I gladly welcome those as well.
How can we be less dependent on exceptional volunteers to build sustainable FRC teams?
How do we transfer knowledge to new volunteer coaches to set them up for success?
What are the pain points that cause mentors to step back?
What motivates people to mentor and how can we tap into that to grow our volunteer base?
How does the on boarding process or lack thereof for new mentors affect their likelihood of staying involved?
Do structured roles and responsibilities for mentors have an impact on retention/recruitment?
How important is the social atmosphere of the mentor group, and how can a team strengthen its identity as an attractive third place?
How can teams prevent a mentor role from feeling like a second unpaid job?
What opportunities are there for community, government, and employer involvement to make mentoring less of a burden on a volunteer?
What opportunities are there for school funded paid coach roles like many other high school team sports?
Just like Dean and Dr. Flowers did back in the 90s, I look to the sports model for inspiration.
Every head, assistant, and position coach played their sport (or at least attended games) as children. Likewise, I believe FIRST alumni are the single most important resource we have as a growing program.
Most of the folks brought in via methods you describe either (a) don’t know anything about competitive robotics or (b) perhaps saw a TV show about robots and the Black Eyed Peas, maybe an episode of Degrassi High, The Fosters or Never Have I Ever. I’m not surprised that folks would blanch at the prospect of committing hours of their life toward a project they didn’t really know existed half an hour prior.
We need a network that tracks FIRST alumni after they graduate, giving them access to teams and coaches wherever their life’s travels lead them. At the bare minimum, there needs to be contact info on firstinspires.org, thebluealliance.com, and other commonly- and easily-used sites. Trying to track down email addresses is a giant pain, and it just feels icky to slide into a team’s DMs.
This is a solvable problem, but it needs to be tackled at the global level. While us local folks can make some strides, it would only be meaningful if HQ takes it, and takes it seriously, to build a networking framework for us.
edit: I was reminded that robots were also in an episode of Storage Wars and a Superb Owl commercial, and mentioned in passing on Battlebots and The Big Brain Theory.
For my district teams we have gain mentors in only 3 ways mostly.
From the school district. All of our FTC and FLL mentors are teacher. Most of them don’t teach STEM just volunteer.
Family Members. We have had parents, grandparents, etc.
Former students. Our minority of our mentors now is former students that have went through college and came back.
We have really only found one mentor that has stayed for longer then a year that had no relationship to the school or family members. Also depending on how supportive your district just ask for help. We are lucky enough to have a superintendent that is STEM focused. Our FLL and FTC is fully funded and teachers receive stipend. Our FRC gets travel paid for and a stipend to share between us. Worst thing the superintendent or board can say no.
I would hit up the parents and Alumni of the team. That is how I was guilt tripped…err…recruited. IF parents are involved (those that can) offer a letter to the company they work for as a in kind donation for allowing the person to help out. It MAY lead to an actual donation to the team.
Our teams resources are polar opposite of yours. We now have 4 mentors…two are for build and two for business (not including the faculty adviser).
Reach out to your local Chamber of Commerce for help and ideas as well.
In any volunteer organization, incoming volunteers need:
A conviction that their time is well spent
An engaging, fun group that makes the time enjoyable
A clear path to contribute at a level that fits their availability.
There’s plenty of right answers to the above questions. People will likely argue over which one is “More right”, but that will depend on your situation.
Regardless of situation, the root is providing an environment that adds up to the needs I mentioned.
It’s great to have professionals as mentors and they can be enormous assets – having a mechanical engineer involved in design is a great thing, for example. But, you can run a team without them. Parents can make great mentors, especially once they get a bit of experience under their belts.
But, you also have to organize in a way that works well for mentors. Our team generally meets 3 times a week: twice in the evening, and then most of the day on Saturdays (later in the build season, we may add more time). And, we don’t require every mentor to be there every time. We don’t meet right after school because that doesn’t work for mentors – they’re still at their day jobs then.
I agree, recruiting from a FIRST alumni network would be easier than recruiting from scratch. However, all the original mentors for FIRST robotics and many current ones were not FIRST alumni.
Something caught their interest and kept them engaged in a lasting way. I suspect there must still be a significant chunk of potential volunteers who are either recently retired or about to retire that have simply never heard of FIRST.
Frankly, effectively sustaining an FRC team often feels like at least a part time job, and often demands the talents of someone with above average organizational leadership skills. Is it realistic to expect the program to continue a growth trajectory when you’re depending on highly competent volunteers committing to a second unpaid job?
First off… it sounds like you (personally) are frustrated with your situation.
Talk to me about this a bit. What does a job feel like to you? What things does pay cause you to put up with that you normally wouldn’t?
Then, second question… what does (or should) volunteering feel like? How do you deal with the things you don’t want to do?
Fair statement, but surely at least some of the volunteers are in that half of the general population, no?
Is the gap perhaps identifying and enabling those with leadership skills to apply them?
No, and that’s why I’m asking these questions. If it feels like a paid job with zero pay, that’s fundamentally problematic.
But I’m asking something different: Clearly, the program currently exists, with tens of thousands of people putting time into it for zero pay. If everyone felt it was problematic, they’d leave in short order.
Yet, every team still has a lead mentor or two. What I’m trying to get at: why is it different in your case?
We are essentially all community volunteers. Oh, we have some teachers and other school employees that pitch in a little, but the work culture there is not entirely compatible with an undertaking like FRC.
I’m handing off lead mentor duties to a couple of very competent gents. One is actually a guy I coached in Little League (yes, mentor recruiting horizon of 20 years!), the other has a daughter who joined as an 8th grader and excelled, Dean’s List, etc.
The other mentors are a mix of parents, grand parents, a couple of returning team alumni. Every outreach visit we do is focused on showing people in the community what we do. “Your kids should do this!”, with the subtext of…and you can help.
A couple of specifics.
reduce the paperwork a little. To volunteer in our school system requires a variable amount of “stuff”. Some important, some ok, some irrelevant nonsense. Last year we got HR to see the sense in having “tiers” of paperwork depending on degree of student contact. Out of town driving and hotel bed checks? Oh, you get lots of videos to watch. Only working at our home base and always with other mentors around? Not quite so many. Your mileage may vary. Everyone can recognize important paperwork. And some that is worthless.
When we have 8th graders on the team now it is a “no out of town travel” situation. Unless of course, family is able to come and be in charge. A good intro to being a volunteer.
We’ve been fortunate in recent years, but the process never ends.
For these two, lean more on parents and on process. Develop clear but comprehensive administrative to-do lists for things that non-FIRST-experienced adults can do, and get parents to do them. Once procedures are written down, new people can pick them up. Instantiate a formal booster board if you don’t have one. Create titled offices and hold regularly scheduled meetings. Hold yearly elections for the next season among the quorum of parents who show up to the last meeting of the school year. And don’t expect them to stick around after their kids graduate. An FRC team is completely alien at first to anyone who doesn’t have prior experience, but many parents are already familiar and comfortable with this kind of structure from PTAs and athletic booster clubs. It feels like an approachable way to support their kids without needing to learn a whole new language as a mentor. The hardest part is building up the cycle of getting parents to be aware and participate before it becomes self-perpetuating.
This is the biggest thing 1648 has done right that kept us afloat through the pandemic and a simultaneous revolving door of leadership. As the lead mentor, I don’t have the team credit card; I never see the bank balances except in the treasurer’s reports. I don’t worry about fundraising. I don’t book hotels, transportation, or meals. I don’t send out email blasts. I don’t hand out permission slips. None of those tasks are delegated to other mentors either. That leaves me and the rest of the mentors to focus on the tasks where we have expertise—interacting with the students, running outreach events and writing award submissions, and building a robot. It’s not an exact answer to how to make that side of the role more compelling to prospective mentors, but it does take a lot of the things that can otherwise make volunteering feel like a job off our plates.
My personal frustration has more to do with unsuccessful attempts to recruit additional volunteer mentors to participate in this program than with a belief that I should (personally) be compensated for my volunteer work which I should clarify I do not hold.
The compensation topic is not about if a head coach should be financially compensated for their volunteer activity based on the value of their work, but whether it is realistic to ask as much as we do of core volunteers above and beyond their already demanding full time jobs. Every potential volunteer has a time budget. Most of that time is spent on their 40+ hr. work week, and asking anyone to run a team on top of that already huge time commitment is very difficult to sell.
Sure every team has a lead mentor or two. Of the teams that currently exist. But most teams that do not exist or have folded, do not exist because there is no one to lead the charge.
Parents have a really important skill that I’d argue is more important than the technical skills: dealing with teenagers. Having parent mentors can help off load that skill from the technical mentors and help keep them around too. A bonus is when they stick around long enough and they find the area that fits them best. One of our parents is a nurse professionally, and now helps make sure our first aid is stocked, and has found her place helping the marketing team. The other is a plumber and found his place helping our build team, especially in the beginning of the season building field elements.
You are lucky because you have a local national lab. Imagine when you are a bedroom community. Here are some of my opinions and thoughts.
Newly graduated or young adult mentors USUALLY don’t or shouldn’t be a main mentors. They would and should be part timer - when I say part timer I meant like 1 full day a week during build season and maybe once in a while or take on a special teaching assignment during off season. Reason being is they are just starting out on their own career path and/or family. They should focused on their own career first and learn more so that they can give back more.
Mentors in their late 20’s and 30’s or ones just starting a family usually SHOULD NOT be main mentors. With young children in their tow, they really should be focusing on them first and foremost. If their interest co-incide with STEM and FIRST, great, then you got lucky. But don’t count on that. These usually makes great remote (CAD/Programming) mentor/advisors and not necessarily hands on roles. Recruitment here should be a HOOK them on now but don’t burn them out NOW…because they will become #3 once their children don’t need them anymore…
Mentors at their tail end of career or already retired and have grown children are usually your best bet. And these should be your focus on recruiting. However, if they have not already gotten them HOOKED, good luck in peeling them away from their other interests (but this is absolutely do-able).
Teachers are great in theory but it’s going to come down to individual ones. We haven’t have a teacher on the team because of the time commitment is required vs how little the school can give as a stipend.
You really need to find those gems who truly believes in the ‘mission’ of transferring knowledge and understanding that the only way for our future generation to compete in the world stage is to get hands on experience and not just being book and theory stuff.
The above are purely my opinion, formed based on my experience in trying to recruit adult mentors pretty much since 2016 (when I started as a parent) and 2018 (when I became the lead mentor).
We are a small team, we have 2 full time mentors and 3 part time mentors. We haven’t had more than 12-15 students in recent years. We only focused on the technical side of the STEM program and leave all the other stuff to the side. Know yourself and understands what you can and cannot do with the resources that is uniquely your team’s. You can still build a team of students that can be competitive on the field as you keep pushing their ceilings and raise the floors to what you expect out of them year over year.
I’ll echo the general sentiment that recruiting professional engineers with no prior experience is exceptionally difficult and probably not a good use of your time.
Parents of students and alumni are by far going to be your biggest pool of potential mentors that have some buy in to stick around. Teachers are going to be a slightly distant third, but free time and energy is usually not something that they have in bounds.
This is maybe cynical, but my entire time in FRC, teams from the pinnacle of the competition to the 10th percentile all seem to survive because of one or a small group of individuals that really drive the organization at the top. There are occasional counterexamples, but by and large this is how the program has operate and continues to operate for decades. It’s not very good from a sustainably perspective for sure, but I am of the mind that you would need to drastically change FRC as a program for teams to not operate like this. I don’t think it’s something you can overcome just with a really good organizational structure because the demands and the intensity of the program are fighting against you.
At some point I think it’s worth considering whether FRC is fun but unsustainable at its core, good to have where the resources and personnel exist for it to thrive, and whether FTC or VEX or some other program is a better choice in most circumstances.
I agree that this is a general approximation of the current state, but I am curious if there is a future state that does not require finding rare gems in order to recruit a mentor who will have a lasting impact and potentially support a team independently.
I suspect your assessment about retired professionals is correct. I’m curious if anyone has any thoughts as to how to connect to this specific group in order to recruit them.
I wasn’t implying this… it is question 10 on your list, but I’m assuming you mean that you don’t actually want to create more paid-compensaion?
Regardless, I do see plenty of “Feels like a job!” comparisons.
I listed three qualities I think are essential for a sustainable volunteer environment, which are definitely not essential for a basic job environment.
And that’s my advice, in answer to most of your questions - assuming you agree with it, form your survey around identifying the fundamental needs of individual volunteers, and prioritize resources to close gaps in those needs.
Most volunteer gigs will naturally evolve into job-like things, if you spend enough time doing them. The good question I see asked here: how to prevent that?
Unless/until someone willing to drop massive amount of money to build a network of paid ‘mentors’ who actually does this for a living. The current state of ‘volunteer’ to lead teams will just have to be the way to go sadly.
There was a local team that was started by a non-profit education company back in 2016 but they went out of business years ago and their lead mentor has to get a job to support his own growing family so has to quit. The team still exists but it’s been hard on them trying to have parents lead them year to year.
I always thought if FIRST/Dean is able to convince the deeper pocket foundations to drop a few B$ as a seed fund, maybe they can open up a whole bunch of these regional FRC centers (yeah I’m only imaging this as a US thing not a world thing for now).
Thank you for the well thought out response. Would you say the main difference between teams that are able to leverage parents as resources effectively and those who aren’t is the presence of a formal structure for administration such as a booster board?
In your situation, who leads the board and coordinates their activities? Also, who holds the board accountable when critical responsibilities are missed or left undone?
The game changer in this is if we can make it a reality for students who do robotics to aspire to be a robotics coach as a career. High school atheltic coaches all played the sport or sports they coach. They are compensated more than teachers are, and depending on the sport or location compensated incredibly well. They also often (not always) teach classes like weight lifting that tie in to the sport they coach. As a result, people who coach set out to do just that.
All of these programs throughout FIRST that are built on years of long unpaid volunteer hours are incredible and wonderful, but they are impossible to duplicate. A school can not just decide to start a robotics program. The have to convince a teacher to work long hours for practically nothing or find a professional in the area willing to do it. That often can’t be done. If they want to start a football program, all they have to do is simply hire a football coach. That person is qualified, knows the sport, and is willing to work the long hours for the propper compensation the school will provide.
In short, we need to start figuring out how to pay teachers more than a stipend to do this. If someone asks me what I do for a living I lead with “I am a high school engineering teacher.” The football coach would never lead with “I teach high school weight lifting” but would also just say they coach football.