By Lisa Markslag and Manon Klein, Impact Hub Amsterdam
At the heart of the NatAlli project lies a simple but powerful question: what makes mentorship truly meaningful in times of transition? As we developed our mentorship toolkit over the past year, we found ourselves returning to this question, not only to refine the content but to reflect on how mentorship can best support highly educated Ukrainian women navigating new beginnings in unfamiliar contexts.
From Skills to Support: A Broader Understanding of Mentorship
In many traditional programs, mentorship is seen as a one-way transfer of expertise: a mentor who knows more, guiding a mentee who needs to catch up. But through our research and co-creation process, we came to see that this model often falls short, especially in the context of migration, displacement, and rebuilding.
Highly educated Ukrainian women bring resilience, adaptability, and experience to the table. What they often need is not a top-down model of instruction, but a space where they can reflect, reorient, and reconnect with their potential. That’s why our approach centres on mentorship as a relationship, not a hierarchy, built on trust, listening, and mutual learning.
Capacity Before Action
One of the clearest ways this shift shows up in our work is in the capacity assessments we created for both mentors and mentees. These tools are not tests or checklists, they are a mirror for both mentor and mentee to reflect their strengths and areas for growth. They also enable targeted matchmaking; for example pairing a mentor with strong marketing expertise with a mentee looking to develop their marketing strategy.
This reframing has had a meaningful impact. It has helped us better understand the mentor’s role as a facilitator rather than an expert and inspired us to create space for mentees to recognise their own strengths, instead of feeling they need to prove their worth from the start.
Designing a Toolkit and Modules That Reflect This Philosophy
The toolkit and modules we developed are structured around four core themes: Mentoring Skills, Entrepreneurial Skills, Leadership, and Culture & Context. These topics were identified earlier in the project through interviews with highly educated Ukrainian women and experienced mentors. As the titles of these themes suggest, we didn’t just focus on content for mentees, we dedicated an entire section to supporting mentors in building trust, active listening, and intercultural understanding.
From SMART goal-setting to psychological well-being tools, from communication guides to cultural sensitivity exercises, the toolkit is designed to be practical, flexible, and relational. It’s a modular resource that adapts to the needs of the people using it, rather than expecting them to adapt to a rigid structure.
What We’ve Learned So Far
We have developed a toolkit including 20+ tools in the aforementioned themes. Besides that, we also offer a training program with 4 modules around these topics for the mentors to get acquainted with these tools. As the toolkit and modules have been piloted in training and mentoring contexts, the early feedback is promising. Mentors have described it as a useful resource, while potential mentees report feeling supported in the process.
Still, there’s more to learn. Not all mentorship relationships unfold in the same way, and not all mentors naturally embrace this relational approach. But what we’ve seen is that starting with reflection rather than assumption leads to stronger relationships and more meaningful outcomes.
A Foundation to Build On
The development of the toolkit and training modules marks an important step in the NatAlli project’s broader vision: to create a mentorship process that honours both skills and stories, growth and belonging. While this phase of the work focused on laying a foundation, we see it not as a final product but as an invitation to keep evolving how we develop the materials. We keep learning as we go, and let those lessons shape the tools we build. Eventually, we hope for these tools to be scalable and also benefit other target groups.
Pictured: Manon Klein and Lisa Markslag, Impact Hub Amsterdam who are leading the development of the NatAlli Toolkit and mentoring programme.
