Mantle Match →
Mantle Match

Free mentorship for one young person out of work, for every paid mentorship.

Hardcoded into Mantle's model. No charge, no time-limit, no caveat. The way we make sure that breaking into industry doesn't depend on who your parents are.

Commitment

What we mean by Mantle Match.

For every paid mentorship on the Mantle platform, we fund free mentorship for one young person currently out of work. No charge to the young person, ever. It is a permanent feature of how Mantle operates.

Over a million young people in the UK are not in education, employment, or training. They want to work. They want a career. But the path in has never been narrower. AI has flooded job applications. Hiring is decided by who you already know. The people best placed to help, retired industry leaders with decades of networks, have no organised way to reach them. The Mantle Match is our mechanism for closing that gap, indefinitely.

Mantle Match is offered to young people aged 16 to 24 who are out of work and want to build a career in the environmental sector. They might be recent graduates without industry contacts. They might have left school early. They might come from communities where the environmental sector is invisible.

What they have in common: motivation, curiosity, and no easy way in.

Partners

We partner with organisations already supporting young people.

We don't market to young people directly. Instead, we work with the organisations that already serve them, and become the mentorship layer they don't have the resource to build themselves.

Schools and sixth forms

Connecting students considering an environmental career with the people who built one.

Universities

Pairing graduates who finish a degree without industry contacts with real-world mentors.

Youth and jobs charities

Reaching young people already out of work, and matching them with mentors who can help them break in.

Partner organisations refer young people to Mantle. We match them with mentors. The young person never pays a penny.

What the young person gets

Everything they need to build a career, except the contacts they don't have.

A mentor

A retired industry leader, matched to their interests, available via the Mantle platform for monthly 1:1 conversations.

A network

Access to Mantle's quarterly in-person events, where they meet mentors, peers, and other industry insiders.

Skills and industry knowledge

Practical frameworks, technical knowledge, and decision-making tools they won't get from a course or YouTube.

Experience to build on

Real conversations, attended events, projects discussed, contacts made. Substance for their CV that the application process can't generate on its own.

Frequently asked

What people ask about the Match.

Is Mantle Match really free for the young person? +
Always. Zero cost. The mentorship is funded entirely by the companies paying for their own employees' mentorship through Mantle.
Are jobs guaranteed? +
No. Mantle is a mentorship service, not a recruiter. We don't broker hires or take referral fees. If a mentor chooses to make an introduction inside their own network, that's between them and the young person.
How do you actually find the young people? +
Through our partnerships with schools, universities, and youth and jobs charities. These organisations already work with young people who would benefit from mentorship. They refer them to us, we match them with a mentor.
Who are the mentors? +
Retired industry leaders. Most have 30+ years of experience in the environmental sector, from sustainability advisory, climate science, ESG, conservation, energy transition, and adjacent fields.
How long does the mentorship last? +
As long as it's useful. There's no fixed time limit. Most relationships start with a monthly cadence and find their own rhythm from there.
What if the mentor and the young person don't click? +
We rematch. No judgement, no friction. The point is the right pairing, not a perfect-first-time pairing.
Why only the environmental sector? +
It's where we're starting. The environmental sector is one of the hardest industries to break into without contacts. As Mantle scales, the Match scales with it into adjacent industries.
I work at a school, university, or charity. Can we partner? +
Yes. Email us. We're actively building our network of referring partners.

Make a Match happen.

Every mentor on Mantle, and every company who pays for their team's mentorship, is part of this commitment.

Become a mentor