Mentorships Help Farmers Become More Resilient

Hannah's Intro

I am writing a piece on the mentorship schemes available for the agricultural industry and wondered if I could please have some information from the HPF about its mentorship opportunities it provides as well as a comment on the importance of upskilling. 

• How long has the foundation offered mentorship and financial help? 
• How did the foundation come about? 
• How many people have been involved/been helped by the foundation to date? 
• What kind of help is available through the foundation? 
• What is the most popular form of help i.e. travel bursaries, business start-up help, mentoring, courses? 

The following was published in the Farmers Guardian. Read on for the full response

John's Response

The Henry Plumb Foundation was created in 2012 by Lord Plumb as a means to provide a lasting legacy to the world of farming which he’d played a significant part in and which had given him so much throughout his long life, he’s now in his 97th year. The Foundation was therefore his initiative and was formed by Henry inviting a group of his friends to help him set it up and they then became Trustees of the organisation. Each trustee is an unpaid volunteer. The Henry Plumb Foundation (HPF)has been offering financial help and mentoring from that time and now has in excess of 120 people who’ve benefitted from its help, with another twenty or so in the pipeline

Mentoring plays a very important part in its list of benefits and such is its reputation that we are now getting applications from people purely for mentoring alone without any requirement for financial help. Whereas the financial help is always important, it is increasingly clear that the mentorship aspects has a huge role to play and might even be considered to be the most important offering.

Becoming a Henry Plumb scholar is relatively simple and usually entails a prospective candidate becoming aware of the Foundation, going on line, completing the application form and sending it in. Once this is received by the administrator, it is reviewed, checked for detail, corrected where necessary in conjunction with the candidate and then circulated to the Trustees who make a first selection. A short list is then drawn up and more information added to the application when requested by the trustees and the successful candidates to this stage are then interviewed by trustees on Zoom during the pandemic. It is also at this stage that an offer of finance is made.

During the interview process an assessment is made of the most suitable type of mentor to be considered and once this has been identified, trustees then discuss individuals who they know who might be suitable and once agreement is reached, the potential mentor is approached and once accepted an introduction is effected.  The process is then considered to be underway.

With particular regard to the question you posed about upskilling, it would be fair to say that many of the young people who come to us for assistance already have a reasonably high level of skills and therefore we are less concerned with upskilling at that point than we are about getting them underway in their chosen part of the business. Having said that an important part of the selection process for a mentor is to find individuals with a good record of knowledge who can pass on their experience and expertise to the HPF Scholar enabling the chosen scholar to learn almost by osmosis.