You don't have 22 candidates, so you can't weed them out if they don't come from the east, or they weren't raised on a farm. Although Denzel works officially with the W.O.M.E.N. Unlimited mentoring program, she believes that the easiest way to find a mentor is to find people who have skills you don't and that you need. Mentoring comes naturally from friendship, sometimes official mentoring can be stifled by putting stress on the mentoree who wonders if they're asking the right questions, or the mentor wonders if they are giving good enough answers. What I did was appoint my own unofficial board of directors, without the members even knowing. I also made a lot of friends and alliances that way.
People are usually generous with their knowledge.
People will normally say yes if you ask them out to lunch to talk, this way you build friendships and broaden your knowledge base at the same time. You'll never know unless you ask - there are great women all around you at tradeshows and conferences, WITI events are great places to meet mentors. My god, she was a strong mentor. She had polio when she was young, she could walk and everything, but she had a number of operations and by all intents and purposes was handicapped. She always put our needs ahead of hers and we learned by example.