Mentors aren’t saviors. And industry training programs need to understand that.

The mentor White received through the company was proactive and eager to help, meeting with him every two weeks (even though the formal cadence was monthly). His colleagues’ mentors, however, were quite the opposite; he saw them frustrated by having to “chase down” a mentor multiple pay grades or levels their senior, helpless to the fact there was “no accountability—all the power was in the hands of the mentor.” A mentee’s experience often “came down to the luck of the draw,” and the corporation’s overall stance was that mentees should just be grateful for the opportunity to work with messages like “you’ll learn what you’ll learn.”

White recognized the same performativity in mentorship programs that he’s seen on a “diversity page where everyone’s smiling, but [the organization] has no controls and no actual stake in their programs actually being successful or not. The problem is that in order for things to improve, we have to consistently reaffirm we are human beings.”

The lesson that “not everyone at a certain level deserves to be a mentor,” as White said, is one that remains to be fully learned. When mentorship programs claim to be creating or enabling change in an industry known to be rife with exploitation, it makes little sense to put more power in the hands of those who are not actively modeling positive behavior.

When the LEE (Let’s Empower Employment) Initiative, a nonprofit that has focused on helping struggling restaurants, announced its 2021 mentor lineup, many expressed disappointment at seeing Chef Jessica Koslow of Sqirl on the list, given that she was under fire for hazardous food safety practices and worker mistreatment. As Instagram user @becandall wrote, “Disappointing that there’s a contradiction in [the organization’s] goals with the selection of a mentor who has purposely misled/mistreated staff and customers.” (When The Counter asked about Koslow’s involvement, the LEE Initiative responded, “We discussed [the situation], and as a team [we] believe in people growing from mistakes and we know that it’s important for people at all stages of their career to learn from people who have made mistakes and grown from them.”)

Recognizing how a mentorship program reifies power dynamics in a mentor-mentee relationship requires more than ad hoc mentor education. “It’s important that mentors know their own privileges and biases, to think about their identity in relation to the folks they are supporting,” said Bie Aweh, a DoorDash human resources professional who oversaw multiple accelerator and mentorship programs at the company. For example, “We need to talk about what [mentors] have internalized about Black women, so they don’t continue to perpetuate harm.”

Yana Gilbuena, a chef who participated in the first Stone Barns Exchange Fellowship—a 3-week program to “support the development of a healthy and sustainable food system”—recalled this tension surfacing very clearly during a classroom exchange with chef Rick Bayless in 2017. Bayless is a famous white male chef and restaurateur who rose to prominence for cooking Mexican food and has been the subject of much critique and analysis over the years.

“Some folks asked him about appropriation, and he did not take it well,” Gilbuena recounted. This cycle repeated itself again in a guest lecture that same year with Mark Bittman, whose comments around race eventually led to other fellows using their speech during the Young Farmers Conference—the concluding event for the fellowship—to address what Bittman had said

To Gilbuena, these incidents were indicative of more than just poor choices in guest speakers. She explained how in the program, “injustice was glamorized instead of being addressed head-on. Stone Barns can exist because of Rockefeller money, and not all farms can do that. Not all farms even own their land. It’s hard to put on a sustainability lens when [the organizer] doesn’t address these issues that all go hand-in-hand.”

The final project for the fellows mirrored the industry’s extractive norms: “We were asked to present proposals for reimagining Governor’s Island, when [Stone Barns] was already talking to Governor’s Island developers. This was presented under the guise of a fellowship, [when it] is something that you would pay a company a lot of consulting money to do.”

The process of deriving valuable labor from the fellows, and at a deep discount, was not made clear in the initial program descriptions. Nor was the fact that the project findings would be shared with the developers, who stood to benefit financially and creatively from the fellows’ insights. Gilbuena described how “​​it felt transactional: There was no sharing of connections nor a semblance of connected community through this fellowship.” Rather, “the tension between organizers and fellows, the microaggressions, the emotional labor … for me, it manifested as physical sickness.”

(A representative from Stone Barns confirmed these proposals were part of the “Design Studio Project” of the fellowship and Stone Barns leadership “had previously met with Governor’s Island leadership.” The fellowship was discontinued after the 2018 program, and the staff who managed the program are no longer part of Stone Barns.)

These types of bad experiences leave lasting impressions on how mentees view their mentors, the host organization, and mentorship as a mutually beneficial exchange. “We need to make young people aware that their time and labor has value,” White said, “but being part of a mentorship program without oversight tells them the exact opposite.”

Without these necessary structures, many prospective mentees cannot realistically shoulder the opportunity costs of a mentorship program, such as unpaid time off or travel expenses. Given star-studded mentor ensembles and the potential for a career-changing opportunity, many mentees find themselves conflicted by a choice that is implicitly exclusionary.

“The pay was not exactly livable,” said Eliza Martin, a chef who went through the James Beard Foundation’s Women in Culinary Leadership (WCL) program. Through the program’s run, the weekly stipend for mentees in WCL was $600, meant to cover everything from relocation costs to monthly rent and living expenses. However, Martin remains satisfied with her decision to sign onboard because “what I gained was monetarily valuable. … It was a fast and furious kind of learning, but there was enormous amounts of exposure, and I built connections I can still call up to this day.” (Per the James Beard Foundation, “The Women in Culinary Leadership Program was discontinued in 2019. The Foundation recognized that it was not resourced to have the infrastructure needed to steward the mentees through the process with the level of care and oversight to meet JBF’s standards.”)

Beyond wages for working mentees, funding sources are another avenue where long-time power dynamics can skew the real impact of mentorship programs. For mentee Ariana Diaz, a writer who participated in a mentorship program hosted by the Social Gastronomy Movement, “my biggest reservation is the people [the organization] is getting money from. … I have so much gratitude for my time there, and I’d like to see them choose funders that represent our community.” That is, not huge corporations but those with meaningful connections to the organization and the communities it serves.

This ability to “dictate the narrative” outside of what currently exists is a critical part of Wild Bearies, a mentorship and community program for the Ho-Chunk Nation. Its founder, Elena Terry, emphasizes a cultural kinship system where no one is labeled “mentor” or “mentee,” but rather all are community members looking to support one another in reclaiming history and ancestral knowledge. To raise funds for the program, members contribute to a catering service, while also learning hands-on farming, cooking, and operations skills.