The SecondAbility Mentors is a fairly large community within Second Life, currently more than 150 members. The community remains active and effective over a year, both in terms of members joining as well as longer-term active members, all who assist incoming callers.
SecondAbility Mentors was conceived on July 1, 2008 as an ancillary organization to the Second Life Mentors, but one focused more on the needs of the disabled community. One of the founders, Saxet Uralia, was approached by the Virtual Ability group with a request to organize a mentor group for Virtual Ability and the disabled community that it intended to serve. The intent was to have a specially trained corps of mentors who could be available at the community gateways and common arrival points for "newbie" real-life-disabled residents. The founders, Saxet Uralia, Charles Mountain, and Avignon Beaumont, had the idea that an autonomous-but-related corps to the Second Life Mentors could bring the needed skills up-to-speed most quickly. Having socialized the idea around the Mentor community and with the Linden V-Team and receiving much encouragement, the idea took shape and the community was founded.
During its early existence, Charles Mountain, with some help from others, developed the supporting website and wiki for SecondAbility Mentors, as well as the call system that still serves the SAM community. SAM's website provides web services that cause the SAM HUD to be validated and verified before it will pass on calls to SAMs wearing the HUD, meaning that the HUD and call system will work only for trained and sanctioned SecondAbility Mentors.