What Was I Thinking About!

Occasionally I look at past articles to see what I was writing about. In many cases the ideas and links I was talking about many years ago are still relevant today. I think that's true of many bloggers. So, how can we turn our blogs into lesson plans that students (young and old) spend time reading and learning from in future years?

One of the problems with blogs is that many of the links used in older stories no longer connect to what we pointed to at that time. However, I think you can see the intent of these articles and the consistency of purpose over many years.

Here's some blasts from the past:

March 30, 2006 - I pointed to a post about advocacy, written by Ethan Zukerman. I titled my article "Collaborative Blogging for Strategic Reasons"

March 25, 2007 - I was writing about the Talent needed in non-profits and encouraging people to attend the May 2007 Tutor/Mentor Leadership and Networking Conference. This article includes a video created from an earlier conference.

March 25, 2008 - Want to be happy? Give money away. This article points to Scientists at the University of British Columbia have proved thathttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif acts of philanthropy can be a short-cut to achieving happiness.

March 24, 2009 - I wrote an article encouraging teams from college fraternities and sororities to adopt the Tutor/Mentor Connection strategy and showed my own involvement with the Acacia Fraternity at Illinois Wesleyan University.

March 29, 2010 - "Act Now. Invest in Youth" was the title of this article. I talked about how the Cabrini Connections program which I led from 1993-2011 needed money, then I included a map showing how tutor/mentor programs in all parts of the city also needed money.

March 31, 2011 - Chicago 3rd Most Segregated City in US - was the topic of this article. I called on leaders from the 50 largest cities in the US to connect with each other since the size of these cities presents different challenges to overcoming racism, poverty, poor schools, etc.

Shortly after writing the March 2011 article the Directors at Cabrini Connections voted to discontinue support for the Tutor/Mentor Connection. In July I left the organization after founding it in 1993, and created Tutor/Mentor Institute, LLC to continue to support the T/MC strategy in Chicago, while also looking for ways to help similar intermediary groups grow in other big cities.

I hope you'll be able to use some of the ideas from these and other blog articles and that we can connect around these ideas and strategies. I'm on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and host a forum at http://tutormentorconnection.ning.com. There are plenty of places to connect.