Alicia M. Sellon

Mentorship is an underestimated asset that focuses on growth and accomplishments and offers broad forms of support to students from marginalized populations, including intersectional and overlapping identities. This article aims to identify the gaps in current literature regarding mentorship, propose an adaptive mentorship model and identify the model's strengths in practice. Traditional mentorship models focus on one specific aspect of student identity, and this gap marginalizes an individual's identity's duplicity or multi-faceted complexity. Such models often offer great educational support but dismiss the value of high-impact research. High-impact research has been shown to positively impact marginalized communities because it allows the unique opportunity to engage in all stages of research. The model described in this paper is grounded in principles of collaboration and cooperation across an interdisciplinary team. Each faculty mentor and mentee possess intersectional and overlapping identities adding unique perspectives and resilience to the work they engage in. This resilience is united with various intersectional study complexities in behavioral sciences, medicine, social studies, and humanities. Thus, it offers a strengths-based experience that widens student opportunities and challenges unitary models of peer-peer/peer-to-adult mentorship patterns.

Volunteerism has been increasingly recognised as a health promotion activity for older adults. However, volunteerism has largely been the domain of those who are in good health with few to no physical limitations, and there is limited information about the experiences of older adults with disabilities. This study explores why older adults with mobility-limiting disabilities engage in volunteer work and their perceptions of the personal benefits of volunteering. Twenty older adults, from three Midwest towns in the United States of America, participated in semi-structured, in-depth, face-to-face interviews. Participants in this study identified as having serious difficulty walking or climbing stairs due to a health condition and had volunteered in the last year. Participants were selected purposively for maximum variation in terms of type of disability/impairment, race, gender and age. The constant comparative method of analysis was used to identify themes from their discussions. When asked about why they volunteer and the personal benefits of volunteering, participants discussed seeking out activities that were meaningful to them for both altruistic and more self-directed reasons. They identified a number of physical and emotional health benefits that they saw as directly and indirectly related to being able to participate in these meaningful activities. Findings from this study suggest that, for older adults with disabilities who are interested in volunteer activities, volunteerism can be a beneficial health promotion activity and a potential mechanism for increasing opportunities for meaningful inclusion and participation in their communities.