Workplace Equity Highlight: The Taco Bell Foundation
Are you interested in doing or learning more about advancing equity in the workplace? Take MENTOR’s Workplace Equity Pledge. Here are four actions you can take: 1. Advocate: Encourage your Congressional Representatives to support the Youth Workforce Readiness Act. 2. Learn: Watch MENTOR’s training on bringing a Mentoring Mindset to the workplace 3. Elevate: Download our resource on the power of workplace mentoring and share it with your company’s DEI committee. 4. Explore: Download our new resource. Becoming a Better Mentor: Strategies To Be There For Young People.
MENTOR believes that all young people need access to caring adults and mentors in their family, community, schools, and in the workplace to achieve their personal and professional goals. Having a champion in the workplace can make or break a young worker’s experience. We are highlighting and celebrating our workplace partners that are evolving their culture to include relationship-centered practices. This blog features the Taco Bell Foundation.
The Taco Bell Foundation has long been committed to supporting and celebrating young people as they achieve their academic and career goals. Since 1992, it has reached more than 4 million young people across the country through scholarships like the Live Más Scholarship and has awarded more than $110 million in grants and scholarships focused on education and career readiness. To expand upon this commitment, the Foundation launched the Live Más Scholars Mentoring Program, matching Taco Bell Employees with Live Más scholarship recipients. The program connects supervisors with young staffers to better support their long-term career growth – and it has had some powerful results. As one mentor says, “It brought me back to my youth! I forgot how those days felt and I feel like I’m better equipped to relate to my younger staffers.”
While mentorship is an essential piece of the program, the Taco Bell Foundation offers many types of support to its scholarship recipients. Scholarship winners join a community of passionate changemakers, gaining access to real-world opportunities, professional connections, and a nationwide mentorship network.
“We’re just really committed to building a community around the young people we support,” said Jennifer Bradbury, Executive Director of the Taco Bell Foundation. “I think that’s what really makes our programming unique, and it’s more important than ever right now in this post-pandemic world because so many young people are facing mental health challenges and isolation. We’re really able to connect our scholars to one another and then also to professionals in our network who can offer guidance for their future.”
The mentoring program played a key role for scholarship recipients and mentors alike. Bradbury shares, “During the pilot, mentors were employees from around Taco Bell, including corporate employees and franchise owners – all different varieties of roles and jobs and levels and geographies and experiences. We hosted monthly coaching sessions to help equip both the mentors and the mentees with knowledge, tools, and activities to help leverage their time together.”
Early data collected from the pilot indicates how poised the Live Más Scholars Mentoring Program is for success. Scholars in the pilot share their experiences:
“We ended up bonding super well. We discussed different topics and how branding and marketing with both products and illustration go hand and hand. Some things I’ve been dealing with, my mentor had also gone through and provided some helpful tips and suggestions on how to navigate problems.”
“As an artist and a person, I felt as though this mentoring experience wouldn’t touch on topics I was dealing with. However, the last lesson or meeting touched on change and how to navigate resources for help. It was super helpful to me to hear how the mentors and Taco Bell staff discuss things that I was dealing with. It made me feel as though, ‘Oh! I’m not the only one dealing with this.’”
“I see myself more confident and found different techniques and solutions to help strengthen myself in certain areas that I’m weak in. By sharing my story with my mentor, I was able to see that I wasn’t alone and I created a new network bond. We were able to look over my portfolio and to see how I can improve and be able to market myself and my work.”
Mentors also had positive things to say:
“Being a mentor taught me that I still have tons left to learn. It taught me that I should not only look to people who are older for wisdom and guidance, but also our youth. Our young adults are so talented, creative, and inspiring!”
“I appreciate connecting these fantastic future leaders with current leaders so that knowledge can be passed along from both parties. It is important that each generation know and understand each other’s journey.”
In addition to offering mentoring support for Live Más Scholars, the Taco Bell Foundation also recently launched the Ambition Accelerator in partnership with Ashoka, the largest global network of leading social entrepreneurs. In this program, 16-26 year olds from the U.S. and all U.S. territories can submit ideas for how to tackle society’s most pressing issues—whether it’s addressing climate change, advocating for social justice, building a more equitable and inclusive society, or solving other critical issues in their communities. Participants in the Ambition Accelerator receive mentorship and feedback on their projects and grow their changemaking abilities, and select teams will receive a trip to Taco Bell’s headquarters to pitch their ideas for a chance to win up to $25,000 in funding. All applicants receive feedback on their ideas and are invited to virtual learning sessions to deepen their changemaking knowledge and connect with like-minded peers.
Young people have always been on the forefront of social movements, and the Taco Bell Foundation believes that they have the ability and responsibility to help amplify young people’s efforts while also learning from them. According to Bradbury, “You need to get one at least one person believing in your idea.” Through the Ambition Accelerator and mentoring efforts, they are intentionally making that happen and are making an impact on young people across the country.
Applications for the Ambition Accelerator are being accepted at https://www.tacobellfoundation.org/ambition-accelerator/ from May 3 through July 21, 2022.
For more information on the Live Más Scholarship, or to apply, visit livemasscholarship.com/.