Follow up Crain's story on Mentoring

I wrote about this series of Mentoring articles in this article yesterday.

After re-reading these mentoring articles in Crain's Chicago News, I see that I was quoted, saying: "To build an expertise and to build participation, you need a core group of people to keep it all running. That's why funding these organizations is so important," says longtime mentoring organizer Daniel Bassill, president of Tutor/Mentor Institute LLC, a Chicago organization that aggregates information about non-school tutoring and mentoring programs on a searchable website."

I repeat my message. Chicago and other cities need leaders to go beyond being mentors, to being marketers who plan strategies that make mentor-rich programs available to k-16 youth in all high poverty neighborhoods of the city and suburbs and keep them in place for the time it takes this year's class of 1st graders be starting jobs and careers in 15 to 20 years. We need the media to support this process with on-going articles that not only share the interaction of volunteers and youth and individual stories of success, but focus on the planning, data gathering, infrastructure building and on-going marketing needed to make mentor-rich programs available to k-16 youth in more places.

I host a Tutor/Mentor Leadership and Networking Conference in Chicago every six months (since May 1994) and would be delighted to have some of the business leaders profiled in the Crain's article become involved, as sponsors, and as workshop leaders who bring others into this discussion of "how we make good programs available to youth in more places".

The next conference will be Friday, June 7 at the Metcalfe Federal Building. Click here to find a workshop presenter form.