Searching for Mr. Right

This is an important week for Cabrini Connections, Tutor/Mentor Connection. We sent out 4000 appeals for donations last week, and are reaching out to more people through our internet networking.

Without year end donations from a lot of individuals and a few corporate and foundation donors, we won't have the money to operate in 2010. Every day I'll be looking at our Holiday Fund and in our mail box, for checks ranging from $25 to $5,000 or more. This is our biggest, and most important fund raising period of the year. The money has to carry us through the first quarter of 2010.

This Local Global graphic illustrates the bigger picture, which I describe as "searching for Mr. Right". While I'm searching for donors to help us fund our Cabrini Connections program, which serves 80 teens living in the Cabrini Green area, and a network of more than 450 alumni which we're reconnecting to on the internet, the Tutor/Mentor Connection seeks to create a system of support that would make several hundred programs like this available to youth in high poverty neighborhoods.

To do that we need a few benefactors who will provide up to $1 million a year in funding for the marketing, team building, training, and work we need to do to help make this happen. We've been operating on less than $225,00 a year since 1998. That does not have a big impact in a city as large as Chicago.

Thus, if you're reading this, and want to help more of the 200,000 kids living in poverty have access to well organized, mentor-rich, long-term programs like Cabrini Connections, help us find Mr. Right, and help us with a few donations to keep the tutoring/mentoring at Cabrini Connections ongoing in 2010.