One of the biggest pieces of professional advice women get when entering a new career is to find a mentor—a female leader who can help you navigate the field. But that's often much easier said than done. How do you go about finding the right person—someone you admire and who's willing to go out of her way to guide a newbie?

To make that process easier, San Francisco women Adrienne Arieff and Lauri Levenfeld have joined forces to launch Project Mentor today (which also happens to be International Women's Day) as a way to help women grow professionally and become leaders by connecting them with mentors. The program is focusing specifically on ladies in creative fields, an area particularly lacking female leadership (shockingly, women control 80 percent of consumer spending yet only 3 percent of creative directors are female).

Arieff and Levenfeld both have a history of supporting other women: Arieff, with a background in communications, is author of the young women's guidebook Fairytale Success: A Guide to Entrepreneurial Magic; Levenfeld, a photographer and founded The Project for Women, which connects girls and women through content and photography. They bonded over their fundamental belief that mentorship is one of the best ways to support the next generation of female leaders and the fact that it's often really difficult for women who are just entering a field or are in the process of re-entering the workplace, after having kids or otherwise.

"It's lonely, terrifying and an exciting time when creative jobs and industries are changing and disappearing by the week," Arieff says. "We wanted to take the next step for girls and women of all ages to feel supported, inspired and well, mentored."

As mothers to daughters, both Arieff and Levenfeld are also interested in helping younger girls, as young as high school-age, who are just starting to think about career paths. Studies have shown that young adults who had a mentor are over 130 percent more likely to hold leadership positions, according to Mentoring.org.

Project Mentor will cull mentors and applicants from an eclectic mix of fields, from advertising to journalism to fashion and art. The program is open to those age 15 and up and, for those who are accepted, the one-on-one programs are free of charge. Some of the confirmed mentors currently include Etienne Fang, Staff UX Insights Strategist at Uber; Vanessa Corrêa, Director of Marketing at University of California, and Lydia Wendt, founder at California Cloth Foundry.

For each four-month program, mentees are matched with two different mentors based on a short set of survey questions, and mentors are expected to give a minimum of four hours for each mentor during that month period (though, most want to give more, the founders tell us.) The matched pairs will go over everything from feeling respected in the workplace, finding meaning in your work, creating work/life balance, and exploring new connections. The program is limited to 10 people per quarter and candidates are accepted based on their application.

In addition to the one-on-one sessions, Project Mentor will also be hosting a variety of programming—both free and paid—from workshops, to quick one-on-one talks with industry professionals, to networking events that bring together creative professionals who are leaders in their industry and women in all phases of their career.

For now, the group is focused in the Bay Area, but has plans to expand to Los Angeles and New York City in the fall. Learn more about Project Mentor and apply at projectmentor.co.