Someone asked you to mentor their child. Here is exactly what that means.
A parent or a program can link you to a child's Distinction record by email. This page is the whole arrangement, so you know what you are agreeing to before you say yes.
What you can see and do
You see everything the parents see. The projects, the journal, the portfolio, the setbacks and what followed them, the record of who observed what. Full visibility, so your guidance rests on the real picture.
You can write notes. Your notes live on the adult side, visible to you, the parents, other linked mentors, and nobody else. The child never sees them, on any screen, in any conversation. Observe honestly.
You get the same parent space access as the family. Mentors and school counselors can open the separate adult side conversation with Cora, walled off from the child's chat in both directions, to talk through how to support this child.
You can propose changes, not make them. If you think a project should shift, you propose it. Cora raises it with the student, neutrally, and asks whether they agree. Only their explicit yes applies it. A no closes it, and that is the end of it. Nothing about a child's plan changes without the child.
What you cannot do, on purpose
You cannot message the child through the platform, and the child cannot message you here. Distinction is not a channel between adults and children; conversations happen where the family already has them, in the open.
You cannot edit the plan, the record, or anything the child wrote. The record's value is that nobody reached into it after the fact.
And everything written on the platform, including your notes, passes through the same safety review as everything else. That is not about you; it is the standing rule that protects every child here, from everyone, evenly.
Finding the right mentor in the first place
Most families choose a mentor from whoever happens to be nearby, and then hope the fit is right. Often it is not, because nobody could say precisely what the young person needed before the introduction was made.
A record changes that. After months of real projects there is a specific, evidenced picture of what a student actually does, where they get stuck, and what kind of adult would move them forward. That picture is detailed enough to work out who to approach, and detailed enough to tell that person exactly what they would be saying yes to.
This has already happened. We used one student's own record to work out what kind of mentor he needed, approached one, and got a yes. The approach was specific rather than hopeful, and that is the whole difference.
There is no mentor directory here and no matching service. What exists is the material: a record precise enough that finding the right adult becomes a solvable problem rather than a guess. Families do the asking. The record makes the ask a good one.
And it does not stop at the introduction. Once a mentor is linked, what they observe is dated and kept, so years later the person writing about that young person is not working from memory. Finding the right adult early and recording what they witness are the same problem, solved once.
My son wants to work in a field I know nothing about. I could encourage him and I could pay for things, but I could not have one real conversation with him about it.
He now has two mentors, in two different fields, and I am in the chat group with both. Most of what they say goes over my head. He is looking things up mid conversation, and writing down afterwards what he learned.
Neither of them knows where he will end up, and nor do I. That is not the point. The people who turn out interesting are usually the ones who combined two things nobody thought to put together, and he now has an expert in each.
It takes a village to raise a child. Not every child has a village. Mentors are how you build one.
Why it is worth your time
Because your attention gets kept. What you observe is dated and recorded, and years from now, when that student needs someone who genuinely watched them grow, the record can assemble exactly what you witnessed, with the family's consent, to support what you write. Mentors forget; the record does not.
If someone has asked you to mentor their child, this is what you would be joining.