Where does "tutor/mentor" land using AI search?

With the growing use of Artificial Intelligence tools like Gemini, I asked myself if these have replaced going to a Google landing page to do a search.  

I wrote this article in 2014, titled "Look in your Google mirror!"  In it I talked about how my websites have consistently shown up multiple times on the first and second pages of most searches when I entered "tutor/mentor".  That's been true since the mid 2000s.   

So I wondered what where my sites would land on a Gemini search for the word combination "tutor/mentor". Below is the result.

--- begin Gemini ---

For a search specifically using the "tutor/mentor" word combination (often stylized with the slash), the results are dominated by a specific long-standing initiative focused on social networking and community mapping, as well as university-specific peer programs. Here are the top ten organic (non-paid) results that appear for that specific term:

Top 10 "Tutor/Mentor" Search Results

Site Name	Focus Area	Resource Type
1. Tutor/Mentor Institute	Program Mapping	The primary hub for the "Tutor/Mentor Connection," focusing on using data/maps to support volunteer programs.
2. MENTOR Mentoring Connector	National Database	A massive search engine to find local programs based on the combined "tutor/mentor" service model.
3. University of Rochester Learning Center	Higher Ed Peer Support	A specialized program where "Tutor Mentors" provide both academic help and student life guidance.
4. Tutor/Mentor Connection Knowledge Base	Library & Archives	A wiki-style library containing decades of research on the tutor/mentor social movement.
5. Davidson Institute	Gifted Youth	A guide specifically titled for finding a "Tutor or Mentor" for highly advanced or gifted children.
6. Tutor/Mentor Conference	Networking Events	A site dedicated to the semi-annual conferences that bring together leaders of tutoring and mentoring organizations.
7. Medium (Daniel Bassill)	Strategy Articles	Deep-dive articles on the "Tutor/Mentor" philosophy and its application in urban environments like Chicago.
8. Scribd (Tutor/Mentor Program Profiles)	Data Documents	Publicly shared PDFs and profiles of various volunteer-based tutor/mentor organizations.
9. Tutor.com - Our Tutors	Service Marketplace	Though a commercial site, it ranks organically for its descriptions of staff who serve the dual role of "Tutor/Mentor."
10. Step Up Tutoring	Elementary Support	A program that defines its volunteers as "tutors/mentors" to emphasize the relationship-building aspect over just academics.

---

Key Takeaway for this Search

When you use the specific slash format "tutor/mentor", the search results shift away from general "tutor" ads and toward The Tutor/Mentor Connection (T/MC). This is a framework developed by Dan Bassill that treats tutoring and mentoring as a single integrated strategy for poverty reduction and student success.

Most of the top results (1, 4, 6, and 7) are actually different branches of this same 30-year-old initiative.

 ---- end Gemini ----

Below is a view of the home page of www.tutormentorexchange.net.  When the site was updated last July a "who's online" feature was added.  As of today, 2.27 million visits have been recorded.

I'm not working with any SEA companies, nor do I have any money for advertising.

Yet having my sites show up when people ask an AI tool to look for "tutor/mentor" and show my sites featured in the results, must mean there is value to what I'm doing.  The 2.27 visits since July 2025 seems impressive. 

I don't know if that last paragraph in the Gemini response was biased because I asked the question, but if not, it's a great endorsement of what I'm doing.

I invite others to ask their AI the same question. Do you get a similar response?  Please let me know.

In 1999 I was awarded the Good Housekeeping "Good as Gold" award during the filming of the December 31, 1999 segment of the Montel Williams TV show.  A $10,000 check, payable to Dan Bassill, was included.  I asked them to redo the check, making it payable to "Cabrini Connections", which I had formed in late 1992. We added the Tutor/Mentor Connection in 1993.

I wrote this article in 2011, titled "Ten Years Ago - Just Prior to 9/11".  It shows many recognitions for work I'd been doing. 

Now, it's 2026 and I'm living off Social Security and funding the Tutor/Mentor Connection and Tutor/Mentor Institute, LLC through small contributions made by a small group of college fraternity brothers, past volunteers, and people who've become fans of my work over the past three decades.

I hope this article convinces a few more people to go to this page and send a contribution to help me keep doing this work. Thank you.

When Have So Many Done So Little With So Much

I was looking for inspiration for writing today's blog and, as I do often, I looked at what I was writing during this same time frame in past years.

President's Summit
for America's Future
April 1997

I found an article from April 28, 2007, which I'm going to re-post below. 

Some background first. In April 1997 teams of 10 people from 150 cities gathered in Philadelphia, at the invitation of President Clinton, and former Presidents Bush, Carter and Reagan (via Nancy Reagan). The event was headlined by General Colin Powell.

I was there. I was part of the Chicago delegation.  The Tutor/Mentor Connection was one of 50 organizations invited to have a display at the Summit, as a Teaching example. I wrote about it in this 2017 article.

So it's now 22 years since promises were made to help America's 13.5 million kids living in high poverty.

Here's what I wrote in 2007

In this month's issue of Youth Today, Bill Treanor has written an article about the 10 year results of the 1997 President's Summit for America's Future, which gathered leaders from 150 cities and all living Presidents, to focus attention on the help needed by more than 13 million youth living in poverty.

Bill's article can be found here.  Bill points out that the America's Promise organization, which was established to implement the goals of the Summit, has raised more than $27 million since 1997. The question is what has been accomplished other than creating high paying jobs for the staffers at America's Promise?

I was one of Chicago's ten delegates. The Tutor/Mentor Connection was one of 50 organizations from around the country invited to have a display at the Summit, as a "teaching example". I still have newspaper articles, and the manifesto listing the commitments to helping the most at-risk youth in America.

As a leader of a youth serving agency in a big city, I left the Summit hoping for reinforcements. I know how small non profits struggle for resources to keep youth and business volunteers coming to non-school programs, and how difficult it is to influence aspirations of education, college and careers, when these aspirations are not modeled by many of the most visible people in high poverty neighborhoods. I was hoping that General Powell would use maps, and be recruit business and celebrity leaders, who will mobilize resources to support the non profits already on the battlefield in our war against poverty.

Instead, the war profiteers are those with high paying jobs, or who are earning big PR contracts. The troops are under-supported. The claims of success are over stated. As America's Promise itself reports in a 10 year report (no longer available online), there's much to do.

--- end 2007 article --

So Much Spent. So Little Accomplished

I went to Philadelphia with high hopes, of reinforcements for organizations like my Cabrini Connections program, which already was working with inner-city youth.

And for the Tutor/Mentor Connection, which was a strategy to help build and sustain mentor-rich non-school programs in every high poverty neighborhood.

That help never came. Instead there was a lot of re-inventing of the wheel, with new people starting new initiatives with limited information.  Of those in power, few have ever come to me to ask "Dan, can we learn from your efforts?"

Bigger picture.

In 2017 I used the map below in an article titled "Pain and suffering throughout the world - how do we respond?

Overlays on this map could show poverty concentrations. They could show health disparities. They could show environmental issues that cause people to leave homes looking for other places to survive and raise families. They could also show conflict zones, terror attacks, and many more  pain and suffering locations.

View this concept map and see examples of the type of information platforms that are available.

I suspect other versions of this map could show places where wealthy people are extracting profit from the suffering of others, either as manufactures of weapons of war, or as manufacturers and/or financiers who extract resources from the land and oceans. I don't have a map showing this.

 Below is one of my graphics, with a map of Chicago. The oil-well icons symbolize programs helping kids grow safely from birth to adult lives and jobs that enable families to live beyond poverty.

There are a lot of places, just in Chicago, where people need help, for many years. There are even more places, throughout the world where similar help is needed, along with many other kinds of  help.

So how do we motivate the people with wealth, as well as those who can only spare a few dollars, and a few hours of volunteer time, to get involved with one or more places, then stay involved for many years, or until the problem is solved.

I don't have an answer. And, unless people read my article and share it with others, my questions won't be seen, and I won't be in the thinking and conversation with others who are looking at the same problems as I am.

So, please read and share my articles.

Then, send me a contribution to help me pay the bills, so I can keep writing these and keeping my web library on line.

Building the Network. Follow up to Race for Results Kids Count Report

The Annie E. Casey Foundation has released a new Kids Count Report, titled: Race for Results: Building a Path to Opportunity for All Children, that explores the intersection of kids, race and opportunity. Below is a recording of the announcement of this publication along with a panel discussion.



In the video, Soledad O’Brien, the panel moderator said “If we have all this research showing what works and what the need is, why is it still such a fight to get it executed?”

One of the panel members responded that “rational self interest, rightly understood, has to be the motivation that brings us together.”

How do we get from here, to there?

While another panel member called this research revolutionary, and “a wake up call” I have been involved in helping youth in inner city Chicago since the mid 1970s and while much has changed for minorities, too much has not changed.

Here are a few of articles I wrote over the past seven years. If you view some of my print newsletters from the 1990s you’ll see that I’ve been trying to build “rational self interest” among the wealthy and corporate leaders for a long time.

Friday, May 27, 2005
Memorial Day: Just Don't Forget

Monday, January 16, 2006
Making the vision of Dr. King a reality

Monday, December 10, 2007
Building Public Will - Expanding the Choir

Sunday, December 11, 2011
Fighting Dropout Crisis – Building Public Will

I've created map stories, since the mid 1990s, following negative news with efforts to draw people together to help tutor/mentor programs grow in high poverty areas of Chicago.

In articles I’ve written, and graphics I’ve posted at Pinterest, you can see geographic maps showing all the places in Chicago where kids and families need help and concept maps representing blueprints that connect the ideas of many different organizations, such as the Anne E Casey Foundation, with each other.

In building a movement, we need to find ways to connect the research, passion and advocacy of existing leaders to create a year-round effort that expands the number of “self interested” people who are involved and who are providing time, talent, dollars and votes to support people in places where the data maps show kids need extra help.

How do we appeal to the self interest of business and the wealthy who are able to isolate themselves from the problems of the poor and the middle class?

I created this knowledge map to serve as a “curriculum guide” for anyone who wants to find ways to reach corporate leaders and build a strategic, self interested, support for efforts that help youth living in high poverty move through school and into the 21st century jobs they are trying so hard to fill. These articles are intended to show that volunteer or pro bono engagement of current employees, is a strategy that helps their current workforce and human capital development strategies, while also building a future workforce.

How do we get this on the reading list of busy executives or in the required reading list of MBA students?

While I can launch ideas with my blog articles and pdf essays, and interns working with me can create new versions reaching more people, I’m too small a player in this game. Others need to adopt my strategies and help build a knowledge map connecting more of the ideas and research from different sectors.

Others need to help create learning paths that connect place based conferences, meetings, dinners, etc. held throughout the year in cities across the country (world) with online learning events such as MOOCs where thousands of people from different places can dig deeper into this information and build relationships and collaborations with others who are involved in the same learning communities.

This learning network needs to include all of the emerging data centers, such as the Boston Indicators Project, the WEAVE network, and my own Tutor/Mentor Institute, LLC library.

If more leaders work to “Pull” learners to the information we share on-line, and work to help them understand the ideas as they related to their own personal and professional lives we might build a movement that changes the future for kids identified in this Kids Count Report, but only if we keep working at this and expanding the network for many years into the future.

If you’re in Chicago and agree with these ideas why not connect with me and help me do my work, while letting me help you adopt some of my ideas into your work?

If you're anywhere in the world teams of volunteers could be connecting with me in on-line communities to innovate ways to map the growth and composition of networks so we know who is looking at this information, and who is helping youth move through schools and into jobs and careers.

I have hosted a gathering of tutor/mentor program leaders every six months since May 1994. The next conference is May 19. I need help organizing, promoting, facilitating and attracting participants. Can you build this into your own personal commitment for expanding the network of “self interested people” who use the research to support actions that change the future?

This is the front page of the October 1992 Chicago SunTimes. If we don't find ways to connect and build the network we'll be repeating these stories 20 years from now.

Mentor Role in Larger Strategy

I’ve often been asked “What type of tutoring or mentoring do you do?” and have had difficulty communicating the idea that volunteer tutors/mentors represent “extra adults” helping kids living in high poverty neighborhoods of big cities who have too few people in their lives who model diverse jobs and career opportunities, and who are working to help these kids move through school and into adult lives and careers.

Kids aren’t “widgets” or “robots” where a certain dose of tutoring or mentoring can overcome the personal and environmental challenges facing them. All kids need extra forms of support. Kids in poverty have extra challenges, and less community support.

This graphic can be found in this PDF essay. It is intended to illustrate the influences in the lives of youth living in high poverty areas that are not as common to youth in more affluent areas. It also emphasizes the supports that are less frequently available.

Over the past 20 years I’ve created a variety of visualizations to illustrate my ideas. I hope you’ll read the rest of this article and follow the links to additional information and ideas. If you agree, please form a group and begin to share this information regularly.

Throughout the country the terms “tutoring” and “mentoring” are used in a variety of different ways, with different meaning, based on the experience and perspective of the person using the terms. Until we group into sub-categories, focusing on kids in urban poverty, kids in rural poverty, immigrant kids who often don’t speak English, and kids who have social/emotional needs, but may live in communities with tremendous resources, we won’t build a shared understanding of problems facing each sub group of kids, which means we won’t build and sustain long-term strategies to help youth overcome those challenges.

This graphic is from a “Defining Terms” essay that illustrates the role of different types of tutoring/mentoring roles, in different types of programs.

I’ve written numerous articles on this blog showing impact of poverty on inner city youth. I integrate maps into many, to illustrate the need for comprehensive programs in many different neighborhoods. This section of links in my web library contains links to many other web sites that focus on concentrated, segregated poverty as a root cause of many social and economic ills. On the Mapping For Justice blog I provide numerous maps that further illustrate this point.

I’ve created a variety of graphics, like this concept map to illustrate the different needs of youth as they move from one grade to another, over the 12 years most kids to move from first grade to high school graduation. In areas of high poverty, volunteer tutors and mentors are extra adults who help young people and communities access these resources.

I point to a variety of articles about “social capital” which show how youth in segregated, high poverty neighborhoods benefit from volunteers and programs that connect them to ideas, experiences and opportunities beyond what are modeled in the family or community. This is a form of “bridging social capital”.

Thus, if non-school tutor/mentor programs are able to recruit volunteers from diverse workplace backgrounds youth would be exposed to a diverse range of career and education models, as well as many different racial, age and religious backgrounds.

Read - Mentor Role in Youth Development Strategy

A program with a mix of volunteers from different business backgrounds can offer a wide range of extra learning and mentoring activities beyond one-on-one tutoring or mentoring. Site based programs with space in the neighborhood close enough for youth to participate weekly are more likely to offer such extra learning opportunities on an on-going basis than community based mentoring.

Programs that have a diverse base of volunteers are “mentor rich”. I used to use the term Total Quality Mentoring (TQM) to show a constant process of innovation and improvement made possible by the participation of such a diverse base of volunteers.

However, not every program has the leadership, marketing, or connections to business, that are needed to draw volunteers from diverse backgrounds. This set of articles in the web library show challenges facing non profit organizations.

This article focuses on “tipping points” or actions and strategies that might help stronger, mentor-rich youth programs be available in more places.

In this 2010 Civic Enterprises report titled, “Untapped Potential: Filling the Promise of Big Brothers Big Sisters and the Bigs and Littles they Represent”, a BBBS study shows that many volunteers are concerned that they alone cannot do enough to help their mentees overcome the poverty where they live. Many are willing to do more.

Thus, while using conferences, technical assistance and training to help each program improve their ability to recruit and retain volunteers, I have been advocating for leaders in business, faith groups, hospitals, etc. to become proactive in building support for mentor-rich programs in every neighborhood.

This “Recruiting Talent Volunteers” pdf and this “Virtual Corporate Office” pdf illustrate roles companies and their employee-volunteers can take.

The links below provide extra reading for corporate leaders, showing many benefits to programs of volunteers engaged for multiple years

==Service Learning Loop flash animation in 2011 (view in this video).

== Volunteer Involvement Growth/Benefit - flash animation - (view in this video)

--- In addition, here are a set of links to articles showing benefit to companies resulting from support of volunteer involvement in mentor-rich programs

This last graphic is a “reality check”. While I spend many hours every day reaching out to build a network of people and resources to support youth programs in inner city neighborhoods, I realize that the world has many complex problems, and most people are more focused on their own jobs, family, entertainment and health than they are on the well-being of people who they don’t see and relate to every day.

Thus, I’m not trying to get the attention of everyone, or even most of “everyone”. I’m just trying to get the attention of a very small percent of “everyone” which really represents a large number of people in a world with more than 7 billion humans.

Or, to put this another way, I’m trying to inspire people to devote a regular slice of the time, talent and dollars they devote to helping others, to helping well-organized, volunteer based tutor/mentor programs reach youth in high poverty neighborhoods.

One way to do this is to help business volunteers become involved in any tutor/mentor program in the Chicago region. I do this by providing this list of Chicago programs in many of my blog articles and my social media.

If what I do is copied and adopted by others, we'd have much more daily attention focused on helping people engage with this information, and become involved in different programs and the lives of kids in many places. This ROLE OF LEADERS essay illustrates strategies that could be adopted in many organizations.

I also do this by sharing ideas that help programs attract and retain volunteers. Workshops at the Tutor/Mentor Conferences always focus on volunteer recruitment strategies.

However, another way to do this is to create a “Great Mentoring Reunion” with a goal of reaching people who have been involved in tutor/mentor programs over the past 40 years. There are thousands of inactive mentors and former mentees who already have some personal experience with mentoring and tutoring. Many have benefited from such involvement. Connecting people from the past, and the present, can lead to greater support of tutor/mentor strategies and mentor rich programs in the future.

Increasing the number of programs and volunteers expands the army of people who are looking beyond ‘mentoring and tutoring’ to all of the actions needed to help youth move through school and into jobs and careers.

The Chicago Tribune is now seeking ideas for a new plan for Chicago. I encourage anyone who has been reading this blog and my articles to submit your own ideas for how we engage people, and keep them engaged and learning from their service, for multiple years.

Without engaging more people who don’t live in poverty, in personal involvement with any strategy that is developed, it’s not likely to reach youth in all the places where kids need help, for all the years help is needed.

If you share your strategy on a blog and send me the address, I’ll be happy to take a look at it. If you join the http://tutormentorconnection.ning.com site you can share your strategy in your own blog within that web site.

100% of Seniors Graduate. What does this mean?

Over the past couple of year’s I’ve seen statements from several different organizations saying “100% of my seniors graduated from high school”. Some added “and went to college”.

With the emphasis on outcomes I can see how this would be a meaningful statement. But is it also a misleading statement?

Here’s a chart I created several years ago showing the 20-25 year role of business, family, non profits, educators, etc. in helping youth move from birth to age 20-25 when they should be starting jobs and careers.

When someone says “all my seniors graduated” they are not telling you at what age level those seniors were when they joined that mentoring or tutoring program. They are not telling the demographic background. They are not telling the academic history.

Thus, you could imply that this organization that claims to serve several hundred young people has built a strategy that gets those young people involved at an early age, like middle school, and keeps 100% (ALL) of them involved through high school and they ALL graduate and they ALL go to college.

If someone working with young people living in high poverty is telling you they accomplish this, I think they are leaving out some important information. There’s too much transition of families in poverty for all youth to be able to stay with a program located in one neighborhood for 4 to six years. There are too many diseases that affect youth in poverty, such as Asthma and Diabetes, or gang violence and/or teen pregnancy, and too many young people getting caught up in the juvenile justice system for programs to be able to keep 100% of youth enrolled for four to six consecutive years. And, if a program starts with youth in elementary school, this is even more of a challenge.

I’ve asked some program leaders what they mean when they claim 100% graduated and they tell me that this really is a measure of those who survived to become seniors, who then stayed with the program through the year, and were accepted for college in the spring. Depending on the level of support a program is able to offer, at what age students join, and what the demographics and family support of the youth is, programs should show different levels of year-to-year retention, but seldom 100%

I may be wrong. However, I don’t see attendance charts on many program web sites. I don’t see “theory of change” strategies with graphics like the one above that shows when a youth joins a program and what they do to help them through high school, then through college, vocational school and into jobs.

I also don’t see information showing the demographics and academic background of young people when they join a program. Using maps to demonstrate where youth in a program live is one way to show this. Providing an overview showing the percent of youth in a program living under the poverty line is another way. Showing what percent of youth in a program attend private schools would be another indicator that would differentiate the youth served by different programs in different places.

That does not mean there are not lots of programs who do have these strategies and this information, but do not share this information on their web sites. Thus, when some leaders boast “100 percent of seniors graduate” we’re making assumptions about what these programs are really doing and what impact they are having.

If you’re evaluating programs and/or choosing between different programs to make funding decisions, it makes a huge difference in the work required if a program starts working with teens when they are juniors or seniors in high school vs if they start working with youth when they are between 7th and 9th grade, or in elementary school.

It makes a huge difference in the services a program needs to provide if a program has recruited youth who already have great academic credentials or potential and/or are already attending private high schools vs serving youth who have not yet navigated the difficult transition from adolescence to high school.

As we head to the National Mentoring Summit and beyond through the rest of 2013, I encourage programs to talk about this topic in blogs, social media and webinars. I encourage you to apply graphics like this (seem more here) to show what age range youth are when they join the program, and what retention they have from year to year, as well as what number then graduate and enter college as a result of the support a program and its volunteers provide.

It would be great to see MENTOR or other leadership groups take on this topic.

If you’re a business, college, or local media, you can help by asking for this information, and by offering your time and talent to help programs create graphics, theory of change documents, and measurement tools that they can use to track year to year participation and retention for their own process improvement evaluations, and for building a more uniform way that all programs demonstrate what they are accomplishing and who they are serving.

I’m hosting the next Tutor/Mentor Leadership and Networking Conference on June 7, 2013 in Chicago. I invite programs to organize a workshop or panel discussion to talk of ways they demonstrate impact and show their theory of change. I invite consultants to volunteer to facilitate a discussion of what metrics programs could show that would attract more consistent support from business leaders and volunteers. The web site for the conference is http://www.tutormentorconference.org

This is also something that can be discussed in online forums such as the ones I host at http://tutormentorconnection.ning.com and on Linked in and Facebook.

If others are hosting such discussions please post links to them so others can find you and participate.

Expanding the Network - A Decade-long Effort

Last week I wrote about the number of students who had been part of Cabrini Connections each year since 2000.

Then in follow up articles I showed how the Tutor/Mentor Connection (T/MC) has been collecting information, sharing that with maps and graphics, and organizing conferences and other network-building to encourage people to look at the information and use it to support their efforts to make more programs like Cabrini Connections available.

Think of it, if one program can provide mentoring/tutoring support to 60-70 teens a year, then 100 programs in a huge city could reach 6,000 or more.

The cost savings to society would be huge if youth in those programs avoided lives of crime or poverty because of more success in moving through school and into work. Then why not invest in the infrastructure needed to make this happen?

This graphic shows the process the T/MC supports. While we all want more kids to stay in school and be prepared for jobs and careers, someone needs to be building a knowledge base that includes information about all of the tutor/mentor programs in the city, if we’re going to learn what works, and help each of the programs get the resources to put what we learn to work in building great programs in every poverty neighborhood.

Collecting information about tutor/mentor programs is a huge challenge. Helping people come together and learn from this information is another challenge.

Because we’ve embraced the potential of the internet we’re drawing people to our web sites who are already interested in what we have to offer. The chart below shows the growth in web visits to to CC, T/MC sites since 2000.



In the T/MC links library we share the experience of others. For instance, this site on web evangelism provides useful information that any non profit could use to attract volunteers and donors.

These blog articles provide even more ideas that any non-profit, including Cabrini Connections, can use for fund raising, volunteer-recruitment and information networking. The links in this section show ways to collaborate, innovate, manage knowledge, and solve problems.

On the T/MC Ning site we’re coaching volunteers and interns to help us communicate our ideas via blogs and visualizations.

While we seek to support tutor/mentor programs in Chicago, the people we are connecting with come from all over the world. Here are some links that illustrate this. (editor note: as of 2016 many of these sites no longer exist)

Social Edge discussion of T/MC maps – Maps and What’s Possible, 2010

UK volunteer video showing how to use T/MC OHATS

How connecting people increases power, by Paul Mondeshire (NYC),

Oprah’s Angel Network article 2009

Crowdsourcing the MacArthur Awards, Phil Shapiro, Sep. 2009

Raising the Buzz: At the table with Dan Bassill, Feb. 09

MapTogether interview, 2009

High Quality Complementary Learning Programs, Learning Point Associates.

We have been connecting with others via blog exchanges since we started this blog in 2005.

While we've had less money for traditional print media and advertising, we’ve embraced the Internet, and share our ideas on-line. We’re reaching far more people each year than we were in 2000. The articles posted above show that the network building and relationship building of the early and mid 2000’s is now leading to work by others that shares T/MC ideas in their own networks.



This is still just a whisper in the internet world. We not only need to find funds to invest in greater advertising and social networking, but we need to find ways to help people understand and use this information. We need to find ways to expand the number of people who understand and share this information like I do and we need to find funding so that I can spend more time in meeting with people in face-to-face events that are held in other cities. While I know that what we do on the Internet has power, it is not a total substitute for face-to-face networking and relationship building.

The 4-part strategy shows that step one is collecting and organizing information. Step two is increasing attention and the number of people who look at the information. Step 3 focuses on helping people understand and use the information so that in step 4 more people are taking actions that support high quality tutor/mentor programs in more places.

View at this link

Tomorrow we’ll post an article about accountability and actions we and others need to take daily to help constantly improving tutor/mentor programs reach youth in more places.

Then we’ll conclude with an analysis of funds available to do this work and opportunities that would result from more funds becoming available.

See the Tutor/Mentor Connection library of ideas.

Learn ways to become a sponsor, donor or beneficiary.

"You helped me" - example of Tutor/Mentor Connection impact

I am part of a youth mentoring list serve hosted by Dr. David DuBois of the University of Illinois at Chicago. This week I responded to a message posted by Graig Meyer of Blue Ribbon Mentor-Advocate, which is what I often do when someone posts a message and I want to connect and add them to the Tutor/Mentor Connection's network.

This time the response was the following:

I'm so glad you took time to reach out. We've actually corresponded on Facebook before. You helped me think through our approach to how we encourage participation in our program. Your advice had a strong impact on a major program overhaul that we just completed.

I've been aware of your program since I was in grad school at the School of Social Service Administration from 1996-98. In some ways, Cabrini Connections fostered my interest in this work. I'm sure you know about Youth Guidance, which is where I worked during 97-98 and has had a huge impact on my philosophy about programming for youth.

I really like the stuff about maps and community-distribution that you've been doing. I learned about that via Facebook. I just spent some more time exploring your website, and I signed up for T/MC. I'd love to bring my staff to your conference sometime, but that's not likely to happen during this budget year.

Every now and then I get a message like this, from someone telling me how much they have used the information we provide to build their own program. It's what we hope is happening. It's what we hope our own donors value, when we ask them for continued funding.

If you've been using the Cabrini Connections or Tutor/Mentor Connection as a resource, please let me know, by posting your own story, here, or on Facebook, or on our Ning site.

Charity work. A Labor of Love

In a recent article, Larry James, President and CEO for Central Dallas Ministries, writes, "Recently, a good friend pointed out the hard, but obvious, truth that every non-profit must almost completely recapitalize itself every year in order to carry on its work. Take it from me, that is a tall order."

He goes on to say, Those who work among "the poor" long enough and with enough "success" sooner or later recognize the need to influence and adjust the systemic forces that contribute to the creation of poverty and to the conditions that keep people living with less than they really require.


If we want to keep putting band aids on these problems, we'll still be doing this fifty years from now. If we want more in-depth solutions, we need more consistent, flexible investment from the people who have the resources, and who want to see a different future.

Thanks to our volunteers. What Kids Say.

I've had a growing number of donors ask me for all sorts of documentation showing changes in habits, test scores and other indicators that will show them why they should continue to invest in Cabrini Connections.

I don't have those types of reports, or the manpower to create them. I do have videos of kids saying "thank you" to their mentors. See this site if the CC page does not open properly.

Here's another video showing impact of volunteers in the Citizen Schools program.

I hope you'll view these. If you feel it is important for this to continue, send your donations to Cabrini Connections, Tutor/Mentor Connection, 800 W. Huron, Chicago, Il 60642 (or use this Pay Pal form).

If you don't want to support Cabrini Connections, you can search the Chicago Program Links and other volunteer search databases and find similar organizations who are also connecting kids and volunteers and send donations to them.

Good tutor/mentor programs depend on the donations of time and talent from volunteers, but it takes money to pay the rent, insurance and staff costs that support volunteer involvement.

Please help us with your own donations.