Final Days · Closes Labor Day, September 7
Fuel the Fire has six days left
The board's full $4,000 match has been earned — and there are still six days to close the rest of the gap. See where we landed ↓
A Note from Ted
Founder, Chairman & Mentor
Sparks Mentors,
After July blew the doors off, August settled back toward our normal rhythm — 29 new student applications, against July's extraordinary 87. But the students that surge brought us are all still here. Our waiting list now stands at 101 students — all but one already reviewed, welcomed, and ready to begin, waiting only on a mentor. A single application is still being read; the entire backlog is a mentor backlog.
The better news is on the other side of the ledger. We received 9 new mentor applications in August, against 6 in all of July — real movement on the one number that governs everything else. Meanwhile you logged 61 mentoring sessions during the month, and the number of students who have completed their full 12-month mentorship — or are in their final wind-down — reached 41.
Our path to closing the gap has not changed: workplace partnerships and affiliate partnerships that bring mentors in at scale. If you have a connection to a company or an association that might partner with us, a warm introduction from you is still the single most valuable thing you can do. Please connect us where you can.
And one closing note — Fuel the Fire ends Labor Day, September 7, six days after this lands in your inbox. Your gifts have already unlocked the board's $4,000 match in full. If you have been meaning to share your campaign link, this is the week it counts. See where we stand below →
Thank you for being the reason this works. See you at the huddle.
— Ted
In This Issue
Fuel the Fire — Final Days
A month ago we did something SetFire had never done in its history: we asked the public for support. Fuel the Fire closes on Labor Day, September 7, with a goal of $21,600 — enough to fund a full year of the program — and a $4,000 matching pool from our advisory board, which your giving has now unlocked in full.
Where we stand: $4,516 raised toward $21,600, from 21 gifts, with 19 of the 50 Founding Sponsor seats claimed. The board's $4,000 match has been earned in full. We are still well behind where we need to be, and six days is what is left.
That is the honest picture, and we would rather give it to you straight than dress it up. A first campaign is partly a fundraiser and partly an experiment in whether a community that has never been asked will respond. Twenty-one gifts have come in so far, several of them from mentors. These last six days are where a campaign like this is won or lost.
You already know the part that makes this work: mentors volunteer, so a Sparks mentorship costs a student nothing — yet delivers a measured $3,000 in value over its twelve months. What donations fund is everything that makes those mentorships possible: the platform, the matching, and the student and mentor recruiting behind every pair.
What would help most this week
Your time is already the most valuable contribution anyone makes here, and nobody expects a donation from you. In the six days that remain:
1. Share your personal campaign link — even if you shared it in August.
Open the campaign page, click “How you can help,” and copy your link. A closing-week post lands differently than a launch-week post, and most people need to see something twice. One line only you can write: “I volunteer here, and it works.”
2. Send it to one person directly.
One warm, personal handoff beats a hundred impressions — and in a final week, a direct note is the thing that actually moves someone off the fence.
3. If you want to give — and only if — give before September 7.
That is when the campaign closes. A gift of $100 or more still claims a named Founding Sponsor seat, and 31 of the 50 are still open. Entirely optional, always will be.
We’re Moving to a New Home
On the weekend of Friday, September 11, the SetFire platform moves to a home of its own. The address does not change — you will still go to setfirefoundation.org — but everything behind it is new.
The site will be unavailable from Friday evening until Sunday. The only meetings this touches are ones you hold on the platform's Video Call during those days — if you meet by phone, or on Zoom or Teams, nothing changes for you at all. Meetings scheduled outside that weekend are unaffected either way.
When it comes back, you will need to set a new password. We will email you a link to do that. Your old password will not carry over — that is deliberate, and it is the one thing you will have to do.
Everything else comes with you. Your profile, your mentorship, your goals, your meeting notes and your history all move across exactly as they are.
If you are wary of emails asking you to set a password, good — so are we. Ours comes from info@setfirefoundation.org, and the button goes to setfirefoundation.org, the same address you have always used. If a link points anywhere else, do not click it. Tell us instead.
There is nothing to do until that email arrives.
Record Student Waiting List
Our waiting list has never been longer. 101 students are waiting on one thing only: a mentor. There is no review backlog behind that number — all but one have already been read and accepted. 92 of them are on the waiting list for you to browse today; the rest land there as their profiles finish publishing.
Here is where they sit by career domain:
Information Technology
37
Engineering
29
Business
13
Health Sciences & Medicine
9
Creative Arts & Design
6
Education & Human Services
3
Law & Public Policy
3
Sciences
1
The mentors we need most
Information Technology and Engineering together account for 66 of the 101. Within those, the heaviest concentrations are Software Development, Electrical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Data Science, Biomedical Engineering, and Cybersecurity — with Artificial Intelligence climbing fast. In Business, the demand clusters around Financial Technology and Finance. In Health Sciences, several students are aiming at practicing medicine.
Every major is welcome in this program and always will be — this is simply where the students are right now. If you know a professional working in any of those areas, that introduction is worth more to us than anything else you could give. Matching happens at the level of the field, so someone doesn't need to share a student's exact specialty to be the right mentor for them.
And because a list this long is a lot to scroll, we've added a field filter at the top of the waiting list — narrow it to your own field in a click and see just the students you could help.
Mentor Spotlight
Brian Roosa
Value Chain Optimization Sr. Manager · Kenvue
Sparks Mentor · Based in Emmaus, Pennsylvania
Brian leads a Center of Excellence team at Kenvue focused on third-party co-packing and value chain optimization — the latest stop in twenty years spanning nearly the whole supply chain function, from demand and supply planning to program management across manufacturing and innovation, most of it at Johnson & Johnson and its spinoff Kenvue, after a supply chain degree from Penn State. His career followed a pattern: a leader would hand him a genuinely complex problem, and he would break it into simple parts and build something that held. He mentors for a plain reason — he says he would not have made it through college and into a career without the mentors who helped him.
Platform Updates
Here's what's new on the platform.
Student Commons
Students now have a place to talk to each other. Student Commons is a student-to-student forum with a general channel, a channel for each career domain, and a channel for their own school that opens once enough students from it have joined. Posts carry a first name, a college, and a domain — nothing about where anyone stands in the process, because nobody should be measuring their wait against someone else's.
Two things worth knowing as a mentor. It is students only — you won't see inside it, and that's deliberate; a peer space stops being a peer space the moment the adults arrive. And it is moderated before anything appears, with contact-sharing held by default and anything urgent routed straight to the program office. Students may share their own email address after an explicit attestation, and they're told plainly that any relationship starting there sits outside the program. If your student hasn't found it yet, it's worth a mention — especially for the ones still waiting on their match.
Share Your Internships
If you know of an internship, you can now put it in front of our students yourself. Mentors, workplace partners, and alumni can all share openings directly, and each one is published automatically across three feeds on our site — so a single posting does its work in more than one place without you doing anything further.
Students see those openings in Launchpad, the job-search workspace inside the platform. And they no longer have to go looking: when an internship matches the career path a student has told us they're aiming for, that student is notified directly. A posting you share on a Tuesday can be in the right student's hands the same day — which makes an opening at your own company, or one you happened to spot, genuinely worth thirty seconds of your time.
Where you do it: open your Mentor Resources page and click the List an Internship tile. Paste the link to the posting — the platform reads the role, employer, location, description and closing date off the page and picks the field it belongs to. You check the summary, confirm, and it is live. It retires itself at the posting's closing date, so you never have to come back and take it down.
Communication Settings on your Mentor Profile
Your mentor profile now carries its own communication settings, so you control which program emails reach you and how often. If you have ever wanted the waiting-student notices but not the rest, or the reverse, that choice is now yours to make directly rather than something you have to ask us to change.
At-Risk Check-Ins
When a mentorship starts drifting — meetings stretching out, momentum fading — the platform now notices and sends a short check-in rather than waiting for someone to raise a hand. It is a nudge, not a judgment: most drift is just a busy season on one side or the other, and a single well-timed message is usually all it takes to get the next meeting on the calendar.
Alumni Resources
Students who finish their twelve months no longer fall off the edge of the platform. Alumni Resources gives them a place to land after the mentorship formally ends — so the relationship you built has somewhere to continue, and the value of that year keeps compounding.
Mentoring Tip
Reset the Goals in Your First Fall Meeting
Whatever your student wrote down in the spring was written by a different person. A summer internship, a class that clicked, a class that didn't, a conversation with someone in the field — any one of those can quietly redraw what they actually want, and most students won't volunteer that the old plan no longer fits. They'll just keep nodding along to goals they've outgrown.
So make the first fall meeting the one where you ask directly. Pull up the goals you set together and go through them out loud: still true, needs changing, or done? Give explicit permission to abandon one — students are often more loyal to a stated goal than the goal deserves, and hearing “it's fine to drop that” from you is what frees them. Then ask the question that actually surfaces the change: “What do you know now that you didn't in May?”
Close by rewriting the list together, and keep it short — two or three goals for the fall term, each concrete enough that you'll both know whether it happened. A goal you revisit in October is worth more than a perfect one set in September and never opened again.
September Mentor Huddle
Join us for our September huddle. We'll cover program updates and discuss mentoring strategies.
The detailed topic list will be included in email reminders sent 7 days, 1 day, and 1 hour before the huddle.
Monthly Mentor Huddle
Agenda
- Mentor Intros, Q&A & Best Practices
- Program Update
- Platform Update
- Mentoring Tips
Can't make it? Meeting notes will be shared within 48 hours. We value your time and want everyone to stay connected.
Help us Impact More Students
Know a Great Mentor?
We're recruiting in Business, Information Technology, and Engineering. Send them our way.
Refer a MentorStudents Are Waiting
We have students ready to be matched. Help us spread the word.
View Waiting ListBeyond Mentoring
Your time as a mentor is the contribution we asked you for, and it remains the most valuable thing you give to Sparks — you are already doing enough. The options below are entirely optional, for any mentor with capacity to help us grow in additional ways.
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