The Civil Service LGBT+ mentoring programme – our new career development offer for LGBT+ civil servants – has won the Developing and Supporting People Award at the 2021 Civil Service Awards. The Developing and Supporting People Award recognises excellence across learning, skills development, strengthening capability, and talent management, or highly effective contributions to promoting or improving health and wellbeing within the Civil Service.

Work on the mentoring programme started earlier this year. Since then:

  • more than 425 mentors and 550 mentees have registered to take part
  • more than 500 people have been given training as part of the programme
  • more than 1,150 mentoring matches have been facilitated

We estimate that the programme generated more than 600 hours of speed mentoring in its first two months. By mid-2022, it will have generated more than 3,000 hours of mentoring opportunities for LGBT+ civil servants. We believe it is one of the largest mentoring programmes of its kind in the Civil Service, and has been developed entirely on a voluntary basis.

The programme was designed and delivered by John Peart, the new Chair for the Civil Service LGBT+ Network. Commenting on the award, he said:

I am absolutely thrilled that the Civil Service LGBT+ mentoring programme has won this award. It is a recognition of the hundreds of LGBT+ civil servants who have selflessly given up their time to support and develop other LGBT+ civil servants, and help give their careers a boost. Thank you to everyone who stepped forward and offered their time.

The Civil Service LGBT+ mentoring programme will be back in 2022. We will post more information about the programme on our website at www.civilservice.lgbt/mentoring when it restarts. In the meantime, if you’d like to help us to run next year’s programme, please email us at mentoring@civilservice.lgbt.