Wednesday, May 16, 2007

Creative Networking to Help Mobilize Volunteers



On Thursday and Friday, May 17 and 18, the Tutor/Mentor Connection has been hosting its 27th Tutor/Mentor Leadership and Networking Conference since May 1994. Our goal is to connect people who lead volunteer-based tutor/mentor programs in various Chicago neighborhoods with ideas and networks or business and professional people so they have more resources to operate programs that inspire youth and volunteers to get involved, and stay involved for many years.

Very few tutor/mentor programs have celebrity leaders or deep advertising budgets. Thus, most struggle to stay visible, and to attract the operating dollars they need to pay the rent, and pay the core staff needed to support the connections of youth and adult volunteers.

Thus, I'm pleased to post this graphic. It was created by Thierry Koehrlen and Clément Devaux, who are part of a very creative organization that creates illustrations like this to communicate ideas.

I met Thierry over the past few months as I was organizing the Tutor/Mentor Blog Exchange and he agreed to create an illustration to help communicate the goals of the Tutor/Mentor Connection and this week's conference.

I encourage you to visit Thierry's blog to learn more about the work he's doing.

We invite any organization that is recruiting volunteers for their tutor/mentor program to consider using this graphic in your blog, or in a volunteer recruitment brochure. If you email me at tutormentor2@earthlink.net, or Thierry at "tk [at] nosvies.com", we can send you the jpg for this graphic. If you use it on your web site, or in a brochure, just give credit to Thierry Koehrlen and Clément Devaux at NosVies.com.

We hope that you show this to artists in your own community. This illustrates how people can use their talent to help us mobilize volunteers and call attention to tutoring/mentoring. There are lots of ways for people to use their skills to help non profits. If we can unleash that talent, there's much more we can do to help kids.

These are the type of ideas people are sharing at this week's conference. We hope you'll join us for the next one.

1 comment:

Vermont Mentoring said...

Hi Dan - We would love to use this cartoon. We need to start a fund raising drive; something we really haven't donw in a concerted effort before. And I am sure we could put this cartoon to good use. pleas email it to trv.mentoring @gmail.com

Sometime when I have time to really look through all your posts and the Cabrini websites - I sneed to get some ideas on how to raise money most effectively. We have relied too much on government grants - one of which was pulled right out from under a program leaving us with no way to continue it.

Thanks for you help and kind words and the cartoon!
Kari