Pink Mentor Network

Stacy Cassio founded the Pink Mentor Network in April 2017. At the time, Stacy led an all male engineering team in a male-led manufacturing firm that served a male-dominated industry. She turned to external sources for female mentorship. That quest proved to be more difficult than expected because while women would have coffee or make introductions, true mentorship never emerged. Stacy launched “Mentor Dinners”. She invited the most successful female leaders & executives to share their experiences & mentorship about a topic she needed development on. Then, she invited other women to attend. In July 2018, Stacy turned the community into a business. As the events & community multiplied in 2019, Stacy began to recognize patterns in member challenges and started to build strategies to overcome them. That mindset led to a new model for mentorship. It gives learners six types of mentors to look for at key moments in their careers, and three levels of mentorship needed to accelerate our careers or businesses. The new model of mentorship is called “Pop-Up Mentor” because anyone has the potential to be a great mentor when we know who we are looking for, what to ask, and how to develop the relationship. In 2020, as the pandemic forced us to socially distance, companies began to turn the Pop-Up Mentor™ model as an alternative way to support & develop the underrepresented among them. The first requests were to transition existing mentorship pairing programs to virtual mentorship communities. Next, Employee Resource Groups (ERGs) sought out the Pop-Up Mentor™ model to provide greater support for their female workforces who were feeling the remote work-life implosion. As the year progressed, companies began implementing the Pop-Up Mentor™ model as a diversity, inclusion, & equity initiative to have conversations around shared pain points.