Tuesday, October 16, 2018

Follow up to #ChicagoIdeas, #ToAndThrough, and more

Yesterday I attended one of the Chicago Ideas Week events, titled "2 Miles, 16 Years: Chicago's Death Gap is a Crisis".  Below is a Twitter post that shows the map shared at the start of the panel discussion, to show how where you live makes a huge difference in how long, and how well, you live.

This is a map showing far Chicago's West side neighborhoods. As I listened to the presentation I said to myself, with considerable frustration, "they are preaching to the choir" and "why have I not been able to get into these conversations at the planning stage?"

I Tweeted out a string of post during and after the presentation, attempting to connect participants with information and ideas I've been sharing for the past 25 years. Here's one Tweet:




Since this discussion focused on Chicago's West side, I want to call your attention to a few maps I posted in recent stories, that also focused on the West side.  Here's one:

Chicago West side
This map shows non-school tutor and/or mentor programs on the West side. It's part of this article, where I point to roles hospitals and universities could be taking to help give kids greater hope and opportunity, by helping well organized,  long-term, volunteer-based tutor, mentor and learning programs reach k-12 youth throughout the map area.

Mt Sinai Hospital - Chicago West side
Here's an article I wrote in 2008, focusing on roles that Mt. Sinai Hospital could be taking to help youth tutor/mentor programs grow in the area served by the hospital.  I've had conversations with various staff from Mt. Sinai since the late 1990s, but never have been able to forge anything strategic that would have helped them implement the strategies I've been sharing.

Below is a concept map that I created in December 2017, to point to various public  health networks and resources that I've been pointing to since late 1990s.  One of these is the Hospital Youth Mentoring Network, that operated from the late 1980s until the early 2000s.

Open concept map in this article, then click on links

T/MC 2001 newsletter
In this Feb/March 2001 Tutor/Mentor Connection newsletter you can see a photo at the top of the page, showing how members of the Hospital Youth Mentoring Network participated in one of the Tutor/Mentor Leadership and Networking Conferences that I held in Chicago from May 1994 to May 2015.

Prior to starting this blog in 2005, I  used email newsletters, and web sites, to share ideas and strategies. Prior to that I was able to send a printed newsletter to about 12,000 people three times a  year, from 1996 to 2002. When funding ran out I had to discontinue this. 

Finally, here's a map story from 1997.

This shows all of the strategies I've been trying to incorporate into our map stories for more than 20 years.  

It follows a feature story in the Chicago Tribune. Thus, reader attention had already been built. We just needed to tell "the rest of the story."

Using donated ESRI software we were able to create a map showing the location of the school featured in the news article, which was located on Chicago's West side. In that map we showed indicators, such as poverty, which contribute to failing schools.

We wrote a story to go with the map.

We built a list of youth tutor and/or mentor programs located in the area. We also built a list of assets, businesses, hospitals, faith groups, colleges, etc. who could be helping youth tutor/mentor programs grow in the area.

In 2008 I received a generous donation of $50,000 which we used to rebuild out desk top mapping capacity, then to build an interactive map directory that people could use to create their own map stories.  In this wiki page you can see what this was intended to do.

Map views created using Program Locator
Unfortunately, we had almost no money to share these map stories or to keep updating the Program Locator. We put some in our printed newsletters, but the reach was limited. The Program Locator has not been working properly since 2013.

Yet, this is still the strategy I've been following for 25 years and which I share with the goal that students in high schools and colleges, and in existing youth programs, will duplicate my efforts and create map stories focusing on their own neighborhoods or adopted sections of the city.

Open tabs for media, maps, violence and public health on this blog, and then browse articles on this blog, and on the MappingforJustice blog to find many examples of this strategy in action.

Almost every week there is a group of people meeting some place in Chicago, or in other cities, to talk about poverty, violence, inequality, etc.  Last week it was the Chicago To & Through Project annual meeting, held in Chicago.   I can only attend a small number of these, and even if I'm in the room I'm barely able to have a conversation with the one or two people sitting next to me.

Are participants sharing info from events?
The only way to connect such a large ecosystem of people and ideas is through the Internet and platforms like Twitter, Facebook or Linkedin.

Yet, if organizers of these events created a network analysis map of their events to see who is engaging on one of these platforms, they'd find that it's only a very small percent of the total.

Among all of the other challenges, this is one more that needs to be addressed.

Here's one more. I'm starved for money pay my bills and keep writing this blog and hosting my library on line. If you value what I'm writing about you can help me in three ways.


1) visit my FundME page and send a contribution; or become a sponsor of one of my sites;

b) add me to your staff as a consultant, and on a retainer, then use me as a resource to help you understand all that I've been collecting and sharing;

c) share my articles with people in your network


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