Lawyers support Mentoring in Chicago

Visit this Life Directions blog to read about a mentor and mentee's participation in the annual Lawyers Lend A Hand Dinner held in Chicago on April 18

Since 1994 lawyers from the Chicago Bar Association have been raising visibility and dollars to support volunteer-based tutor/mentor programs in all parts of Chicago. While the amount raised and donated averaged between $25,000 and $50,000 per year from 1995-2006, the visibility that was created by events such as an annual Tutor/Mentor Week Event held in November each year from 1995-2000, led to a $100,000 grant from the estate of Judge Abraham Lincoln Marovitz in 2000 to create the Lawyers Lend a Hand to Youth Program. In 2006 a $2 million grant from the Chicago Sun Times enabled the annual grant pool to increase to more than $200,000 each year.

If leaders and volunteers in every industry and professional group were to duplicate this type of support for tutor/mentor programs in the entire Chicago region we could create multiple streams of volunteer and financial support for on-going operations of programs that need to stay connected to youth for many years to maximize their impact. That's the idea this chart represents. I created this in the mid-1990's to represent an idea I called "Total Quality Mentoring" which borrows from a Peter Drucker concept of Total Quality Management, or constant improvement based on learning from your own efforts, from the work of competition, and what the marketplace tells you.

If teams of volunteers in business, universities, hospitals, professions, and religious organizations begin to adopt the concepts of TQM into their efforts to build and sustain mentor-rich youth support systems in all places where kids need extra help, we could change the way non-profits and social entrepreneurs are supported by changing how resource providers deliver their support.

Read more articles on this blog and follow the links to other Tutor/Mentor Institute, LLC sites, and to the sites I learn from. Make this part of your regular learning and invite friends and co-workers to join you.

There could be dozens of celebrations of mentoring taking place every month, in every part of the world. It just takes a small group of people to say "If it is to be, it is up to me."