Mentor and Volunteer Spotlights

The Lancaster County Board of Commissioners recognized the importance of small business in Lancaster County with a proclamation highlighting Small Business on Saturday, November 26, 2022.

Mentorship is considered vital to a startup. Having an excellent product is essential, and so is good market traction. Equally important is a great mentor.

New SCORE mentor Winifred McGee brings considerable expert skills to the Chapter in the fields of agriculture, food production, and food safety.

John comes to his role as a mentor with over twenty-five years of experience in the printing and packaging industry. His work background includes roles in a variety of management and sales positions within several large corporations and running a small $15 million labeling equipment business for eight years.

Meet new SCORE mentor Catherine Weaver. She is retired from a career in human resource management and leadership development.

Cyndi De Long earned a Bachelor of Science from Penn State in Business and Spanish with an MBA from the University of South Carolina.  She comes to SCORE Lancaster-Lebanon fluent in Spanish after a robust career in Mexico that spanned three decades.

You will find a women's network for almost every major field in business – tech, medicine, communications, science, the arts. Women are drawn to this sort of support and collaboration in a busy world where making connections is not always easy.

The beginning of December marked a significant milestone for an extraordinary mentor. After retiring, Lou Davenport began his second career with SCORE on December 1, 1996 – twenty-five years ago. He is as passionate about his clients today as he was from the very beginning.

The monthly rate for new mentor requests continues to grow for SCORE Lancaster-Lebanon. Each new volunteer mentor is a critical asset to ensure that our clients receive the timely guidance they need to succeed. Our volunteers can give back to their community by fueling local small businesses that create jobs, contribute to the local economy, and lend a distinct character & personality to a community. Unpaid volunteers are often the glue that holds a community together. Volunteering allows you to connect to your community and make it a better place

SCORE Lancaster-Lebanon serves a region that has a growing Latino population and a large refugee community. Communication is key to effective mentoring. And that can be a challenge when trying to serve segments of our community that have limited English language skills — and a wide range of native languages. 

The small business community faces unique challenges in the months ahead as business owners, entrepreneurs, and start-ups deal with the unpredictability of an economy so easily influenced by the public healthcare crisis brought on by the COVID pandemic.

An estimated nine million people aged 65 and older volunteer their time each year in this country. SCORE chapters are built on the support of dedicated volunteers and draw on their lifetime of experience and skills. There is no more exemplary model of this than SCORE Lancaster-Lebanon volunteer mentor Tom Roche.