For National Mentoring Month, President-Elect Obama, Colin Powell and George W. Bush are promoting “mentoring” PSAs featuring the likes of Clint Eastwood, Oprah, Sting, Ray Charles and many other celebrities and politicians.

While we’ve never really noticed it before - maybe it’s the sense of “volunteerism,” a la JFK, that Obama is bringing to the Presidency - but we’ll run and support it either way. January is National Mentoring Month, and Thursday, January 22, 2009 will be the sixth annual Thank Your Mentor Day.

Per Harvard’s School of Public Health:

National Mentoring Month is spearheaded by the Harvard Mentoring Project of the Harvard School of Public Health, MENTOR/National Mentoring Partnership, and the Corporation for National and Community Service. Media partners include: CBS, FOX, NBC, MTV, Comcast, Time Warner, and the National Association of Broadcasters.

Harvard’s School of Public Health set up a ReelPeople project, allowing everyday users to win a role in the PSAs. A decent site from Harvard but this should get picked up in Facebook, LinkedIn and other business networking sites.

Already Obama’s transition site has received nearly one million applications from non-political civilians yearning to give back and help the country. What’s next a next-generation Peace Corps (sounds like a good ideal ‘Peace Corps’ blog for me to write). Harvard has also devised a “Four Ways to Honor Your Mentor” set of guidelines:

1. Contact your mentor directly to express your appreciation.
2. Pass on what you received by becoming a mentor to a young person in your community.
3. Make a financial contribution to a local mentoring program.
4. Write a tribute to your mentor for posting on www.WhoMentoredYou.org.

I personally have five mentors in media entertainment and technology, and try to stay in touch at least once per quarter, but I’d like to see something Web 2.0ish to extend LinkedIn or similar app’s ability to check in with someone who can either call them to the floor or give gentle pushes, depending.

Who are your mentors: what have they helped you with? Conversely, who have you mentored and why? As a “New Medici” how do you share your experience/knowledge base to build a legacy platform to help others, which (like it a lot) will inevitably come back and help you tenfold-plus.