School has started and volunteer-based tutor, mentor and learning programs in Chicago and across the country are at different stages of volunteer and student recruitment, orientation, training and matching.
Ideally, most of the planning that for this year's activities began last spring and continued through the summer. My focus is on helping programs with their planning so they are even better when they start again in the coming year.
I led one volunteer-based tutor/mentor program in Chicago from 1975 to 1992, then with the help of six other volunteers, started a new program in November 1992, which I led until June 2011. These were hosted at the Montgomery Ward Corporate Headquarters on Chicago Avenue until 1999.
When I say "volunteer-based" I'm not just talking about the adults who serve as tutors and mentors, but those who do more, helping to organize and operate the program.
The program I started leading in 1975 was already 9 years old when I became its leader. It had 100 pairs of volunteers and elementary school-age youth participating by the fall of 1975, after starting in 1965 with just a small group of corporate volunteers.
I had started as a volunteer in 1973, then joined the leadership committee in 1974. I took over when the previous leader decided to take off for Europe, saying "Dan should lead, since he talks the most!"
The graphics below illustrate the growth of the program from 1974 to 1992.
The committee in 1974-75 had nine members. It was led by Roger Kennedy, a copywriter in the MW Catalog Advertising Department.
In the spring of 1990 I left my corporate job with Montgomery Ward and we converted the program to a non-profit, named Cabrini-Green Tutoring Program, Inc. This enabled me to raise money to pay myself a salary to continue leading the program and to hire others to help. The 1991-92 volunteer leadership structure reflects the growth of the program to 440 kids and 550 volunteers by June 1992. More than 60 volunteers, including student alumni, were involved in planning and operating the program. I was the only full-time employee. We had three part timers helping.
I starting a written annual plan in the late 1970s and rather than starting each new year from scratch, we built on what we'd done before, getting better, adding new elements, discarding what was not working. Here's an example of this annual plan. This is from 1984-85.
That's one of the secrets of growing a tutor/mentor program from "good to great" over many years.
My departure from the CGTP in October 1992 was painful, and the result of a lack of agreement on how the program should operate and what its future growth would be, between myself and the volunteers who I had recruited to be our Board of Directors in 1990 when we created the non-profit.
I immediately began to focus on what had divided myself and the other program. First was the decision to expand and serve 7th to 12th grade kids who had graduated from the original program at the end of 6th grade. Second was to help similar programs grow in all high poverty areas of Chicago.
We created Cabrini Connections to help kids from the original program go from 7th grade through high school. Starting with 5 teens and 7 volunteers in January 1993 we grew to 80 teens and 100 volunteers by 1998 and due to the limited space we had, we stayed around that number until I left in 2011. We used our first grant in 1993 to hire two part time staff (veteran volunteers from the original program). As we raised more money in 1994 I began to draw a salary. We never had more than 3-4 full time staff members and 3-4 part time staff and interns between then and 2011.
I never earned as much as I was earning during my final years at Wards. And, since forming the Tutor/Mentor Institute, LLC in 2011, I've drawn no salary.
We spent all of 1993 planning what became the Tutor/Mentor Connection and launched it in January 1994. In 2011 I created the Tutor/Mentor Institute, LLC to continue to operate the T/MC in Chicago and help similar intermediaries grow in other cities.
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