Learning Components

Mentoring

Support is a critical component of the EXTRA program. During the fellowship, fellows can count on various sources for help. The relationships built within the training cohort create a collegiality between participants of various skills and expertise. Moreover, the program is structured to provide fellows with an external mentoring team in addition to the sponsor and CEO of the fellow's home organization. Mentoring plays a key role in supporting the fellows, especially in the long periods between the residency sessions while fellows are engaged in self-directed learning and developing their intervention projects.

Regional Mentoring Centres

The regional mentoring centres are the direct contact point for the fellow-mentor relationships in the regions. Their role is to ensure support is provided to EXTRA fellows with the academic course material and intervention projects (both in their design and implementation).

Mentoring centres hold an orientation workshop each September for the fellows, mentors, researchers, and interested decision makers in the region to introduce the new cohort of fellows to potential mentors and create more opportunities for collaboration between the research and applied worlds.

A key activity of the fellows in the EXTRA program is applying the concepts and theoretical information from the academic curriculum to real-life conditions in the home organization. The mentoring centres ensure the intervention projects garner special attention in the mentoring component, from both the mentoring team and the mentoring centre leads.

The following four centres operate as the mentoring sites for the EXTRA program. Each of these also covers the northern parts of its region:
Making Research Work