White House Mentoring. What's the Strategy?

I'm part of a Youth Mentoring Listserv hosted by Dr. David DuBois. Today someone shared an article about Michelle Obama launching a White House Mentoring program.

The consensus of the group was "good" and "why didn't she draw upon the collective wisdom of some of these experts to design the program?"



While the White House is launching its own mentoring strategy, we have plenty of problems in Chicago. Mike Trakan, Map Maker for the Tutor/Mentor Connection, created this map, and this article, showing the location of the most recent high-profile youth murder in Chicago.

Mike and the Tutor/Mentor Connection provide a lot of information and resources that leaders in Chicago, and the White House, could be using to build their own mentoring strategies. I updated a couple of the Essays in the Tutor/Mentor Institute today to help with such research.

In Defining Terms and Building a Network of Purpose, I ask people to build programs based on what youth they want to help, and what result they want to achieve.

At Cabrini Connections we're celebrating the holidays this week. We've been doing this every year since 1993. Our roots extend back to 1965 when employees of the Montgomery Ward Corporation started meeting every Tuesday evening after work with elementary school kids in the Cabrini Green area.

I think this represents one of the longest running tutor/mentor programs in the country. We have a lot of experience. Maybe the White House would want to talk to us?



I hope you'll value this knowledge and what we've been doing enough to make a Holiday Donation so we're able to keep doing this work, and sharing our ideas, in 2010.