Making Mentor-Rich Programs Available to More Youth in Chicago

Last Friday more than 100 people attended the Tutor/Mentor Leadership and Networking Conference held at the Ralph E. Metcalfe Federal Building in Chicago.

During the opening remarks Maxine Williams, who was coordinator of the FunDay School in Chicago and Samuel Carter, who attended from 4th grade through high school gradation, were speakers.

Maxine's story can be found here, showing that the program was featured on a 48 Hours episode about violence in Chicago, and that the program no longer is operating, although she's still connected to young people like Samuel.

Following the conference, one of the other workshop speakers, Daniel Cotter, chair of the Lawyers Lend A Hand to Youth Program, emailed me with this message: "I hope the session was useful and of interest to the attendees. Sam seemed like a great young man! We need more help as we have discussed in the arena to make sure we have thousands of Sams."

During my noon presentation I showed a set of maps like this one. Each showed the number of high poverty youth, age 6-17, living in each Chicago community area. The presentation is here.

My goal is that people in each community area will use this information, and the other information on the Tutor/Mentor Institute, LLC web site, to gather leaders of business, faith groups, hospitals, education organizations, non profits, media, government, etc. into an on-going set of meetings intended to increase the resources available to support the growth of mentor-rich non-school tutoring, mentoring, arts, technology and college and career preparation programs in EACH community area.

It's not enough to have a few great programs in a few places. Chicago and its suburbs needs great tutor/mentor programs serving k-12 youth in every high poverty neighborhood.