See new links added to Tutor/Mentor library

Below is a view of the home page of the www.tutormentorexchange.net website.

I started a "new links added" page in 2022 to make it easier for people to find new links that I was regularly adding to the resource library on the website.  Since then I've added a new links page for 2023, 2024 and 2025.

If you view this today, 8-7-2025, you'll see these as the most recent additions:

8-7-2025 - HISTORY OF THE WEB - INNOVATIVE DESIGNS OF 1995
https://thehistoryoftheweb.com/the-innovative-designs-of-1995/
This article looks back to 1995 and the beginning of the www internet.  
Find in this section

8-7-2025 - WHAT HAPPENED? TWITTER,COVID, REMOTE WORK, & LOSS
https://new.express.adobe.com/webpage/iHtGUPNYnZx06
This article is a reflection about how changes at Twitter, and caused by Covid, affected to learning communities and relationships of one person, and how he is now rebuilding.  It shows roles anyone can take to build a network of peers and friends. 
Find in this section

8-6-2025 - UNDERSTANDING THE MAGA MOVEMENT - JAMES GREENBERG ARTICLES
https://jamesbgreenberg.substack.com/p/the-authority-rebellion
This link points to a James Greenberg article on Substack, titled "The Authority Rebellion".  It's one of a series of articles worth reading to understand how the USA got to where we are in 2025 and ways to try to undo the harm and create a brighter future. 
Find in this section

8-5-2025 - ELECTECH - A LOT OF STUFF AND NONSENSE - IMAGINE CREATING SITE LIKE THIS WITH YOUR STUDENTS
https://eclectech.co.uk/
Take a tour through the electech website, which is an archive of "things" created over the past 20 years by the author. Open the sections of "silly images, animated GIFs, photos, animation & video and playthings".  As you do, imagine helping students create similar similar things, and host them on their own website, or a shared site.  Lots of inspiration, and enjoyment, on this site.
Find in this section

7-31-2025 - IN THESE TIMES
https://inthesetimes.com/
From the website: "In These Times is an independent, nonprofit magazine dedicated to advancing democracy and economic justice, informing movements for a more humane world, and providing an accessible forum for debate about the policies that shape our future."
Find in this section

7-30-2025 - PARTNERSHIP FOR STUDENT SUCCESS AT JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY
https://www.partnershipstudentsuccess.org 
From the website: "Based at the Johns Hopkins University Everyone Graduates Center, The Partnership for Student Success supports a nationwide effort in local and state communities across the country to bring evidence-based and people-powered support to all students. We bring together experts and practitioners in education, national service, and youth development to support locally-driven implementation of tutoring, mentoring, student success coaching, postsecondary transition coaching, wraparound/integrated student supports, and other evidence-based practices that support children and youth."   Visit the RESOURCES page and find an extensive library.
Find in this section

These are just a few of the links added thus far in 2025.  See the list at this link. 

Beneath each description is a "Find in this section" line, with a link to the page where that link, and many like it, can be found.

If you did a Google search for this information, you might be able to build as comprehensive a list as I have, but it would take you a lot of time.  I'm not sure asking AI to create a list for you will be any more effective.  

But, that's why I created this library over 25 years ago.  It saves you time and expands your options. 

Prior to 2020, I hosted the library on the www.tutormentorconnection.org website, which was built for me by a team at IUPUI in 2006.  That site was much more interactive than the current site. 
 

Unfortunately, the site began to attract too much spam and had to be shut down. That's why I moved all the listings to the www.tutormentorexchange.net site.   As the video shows, the former site had some robust search features to help people find specific information.  

The current site also has a search feature, but it only takes you to the page where the link is part of a list, organized in alphabetical order.  If the name starts with a "w" you'd need to scroll to the bottom of the list to find it.

It's not ideal. But it works.

For the past few years I've ended my blog articles by encouraging others to adopt the work I've been doing.  Imagine a university, funded with an endowment from someone like MacKenzie Scott, hosting an on-campus Tutor/Mentor Connection, where students, faculty and alumni were doing everything I've been doing, hosting the web library, and drawing attention to it, and building support for youth-serving programs in their community.  

Everything that's now an archive could be rebuilt, making it better than before, reaching more people, and doing more to help people living in areas of persistent poverty.

If  you share my articles with people in your network, and they share it in their network, the message might reach receptive ears.  Give it a try.

In the meantime, share your own ideas and networks with me on social media. And, visit this page and send a contribution so I can continue to keep the current site and library available to you and the world.

Thank you.

Poverty and Racism in America - Understand the Issues

It's a new week, but with continuing problems based on past history and compounded by current leadership.  I don't know all the issues, nor most of the solutions.  However, while I've been trying to build my own understanding since I became a volunteer in a Chicago tutor/mentor program in 1993, I've also been sharing articles and resource links that I've found in a library that enables other people to find and use the same information.

Below is what I wrote in May 2023.  I've added a few additional links in the text.

--- begin ---

In early May I watched a presentation hosted by the Urban Institute, featuring Matt Desmond, author of a new book titled "Poverty in America".  Open this link to view the video of the presentation. 

In a follow up email the Urban Institute summarized some of the key points of the webinar.  They wrote:

While no one policy is a silver bullet, Desmond suggests keeping these ideas in mind:

• Social justice: “It’s impossible to write about poverty in America without writing about racism in America,” Desmond said. Black and Latinx families have lower incomes, a lower homeownership rate, less in savings, and ultimately less average wealth than white families. Therefore, any steps forward must come from the position of breaking down segregation and structural racism.
• Targeted universalism: Rather than targeting one solution to each group or each problem, Desmond recommended identifying the desired societal outcome, then implementing many universal solutions that could address it.
• Start with your own influence: “It’s easier to change norms than beliefs,” Desmond said, meaning that individual actions can build political will for larger changes. For researchers, influence can mean empowering communities, advocates, and journalists to tell their own story through data.

Then, on May 21, an opinion article in Politico, by Sheryll Cashin, a law professor at Georgetown University and author of several books on racial justice and American democracy, provided an in-depth analysis in an article titled: America’s Poverty Is Built by Design: How did the U.S. become a land of economic extremes with the rich getting richer while the working poor grind it out? Deliberately." 

I added links to Matt Desmond's website to the Tutor/Mentor Library. You can find them here, and here.

I also encourage you to skim through some of these articles. 

I and six other volunteers created Cabrini Connections (a site-based tutor/mentor program) and the Tutor/Mentor Connection in November 1992 following the shooting death of a 7-year old boy, in the Cabrini-Green area of Chicago.  I've used this front-page story from the October 1992 Chicago Sun-Times as a reminder and motivation every year since then.

In the summary above Desmond is quoted as saying "individual actions can build political will for larger changes". 

This is not a new problem. However, it's a problem that our leaders can't stay focused on every day, because there are so many other problems.

That's why I think it's important for another level of leaders to emerge, who are totally focused on building a better community understanding, and response, to the problems and solutions.

I've been issuing this invitation for the past 25 years, since we formed Cabrini Connections, Tutor/Mentor Connection, in the weeks following the shooting of Dantrell Davis in Chicago back in October 1992. I keep the front page of this Chicago SunTimes story in my office, as a reminder of my responsibility.

I've developed my own actions steps, and posted them on this blog in the past. Here they are again:

If we want to stop this violence, we have to act now, and keep acting to solve this problem for many years. We have to think spatially, that is, look at the entire city and suburban problem, not just one neighborhood. At the same time, we need to act locally, because none of us has the time, or the resources to help each of the kids in the entire Chicago region who live in neighborhoods where poverty is the root cause of the violence.

This animation was done by one of my interns after reading this article.

Here are some ways to remind yourself. Think of ENOUGH, is ENOUGH

E – educate yourself – most of us do not live in high poverty neighborhoods, so we only understand the root causes of senseless shootings from what we read in newspapers. We also only read negative news in the media, so we’re not really well informed on where these events are taking place most frequently. Finally, while there is a perception that there are plenty of youth programs, we really don’t have a good understanding of the distribution of different types of youth programs, to different age groups, in different zip codes. The only way this will change is if each of us pledges to spend one hour a week reading books, articles and web reports, that illustrate the root causes of these shootings, or of poor performance in schools. Through our learning we can draw ideas that we use in our own actions. We can also begin to contribute information that other people use to support their own decision making.

To help with your learning about race, poverty and inequality in America browse the different sections of the Tutor/Mentor library, shown on this concept map. 



N – engage your network – find ways to draw others who you know into this shared understanding. Recognize people who volunteer time and talent, or who help kids through the programs they operate. If you are a business leader, or a church leader, engage your corporation or your congregation. You can use your web site, advertising, point of purchase materials, etc. to point to web sites that show all of the agencies in the city who do tutoring/mentoring, such as www.tutormentorexchange.net. If you do this weekly, year after year, your friends, coworkers and customers will become involved in solving this problem with you.

O – offer help, don’t wait to be asked. As you build your understanding of where poverty is most concentrated, and what social services are in those areas, choose a neighborhood, and reach out with offers of time, as a volunteer, talent, help build a web site, do the accounting, or offer Public relations services, and dollars, if the web site of an organization shows they do good work, you don’t need to ask for a proposal of how they would spend your donation, you need to send them a donation so they can keep doing that good work

U – build a shared understanding. Form groups of peers to share reading and learning assignments, just as you meet every Sunday to read passages of scripture and build the group’s understanding of the Word of God. Use the many different resources of the T/MC Links library as the starting point for your search for wisdom, and understanding.

G – give until it feels good – people who generously donate time and dollars to causes they believe in feel good about their giving. If we’re going to surround kids living in poverty dominated neighborhoods with extra learning and adult mentoring networks, donors will need to give more than random contributions of time, dollars and talent.  

H – form habits of learning, and pass these on to your kids. Imagine how much more successful teachers were if youth came to school every day asking questions about where to find information, or how to understand information they had researched on the Internet the previous day? We can model that habit if we build it into our own activity. Keep a chart where you can document actions you take each week to same sure that this time ENOUGH, really means ENOUGH.

If you document actions, you can review what you’ve done at the end of each month, and each year, and begin to see a growing mountain of actions you have taken to solve this problem. Some of these will be actions that got other people involved, so that the good work you do is multiplying because of the good work others are also doing.

Through this process you help build this shared understanding, which will lead to better public policy. Without this habit of learning, and without learning to use the Internet to find good ideas from people in all parts of the world, we won’t be able to problem solve as well as we need to, and we won’t be able to teach this habit to our kids.

Share this post and the links I point to. Start discussions in your own circles of influence. Be the  YOU in the graphic shown above.

If we do this, we’ll not only reduce the root causes of youth on youth violence, we’ll also address one of the growing issues facing America in a global economy. We will begin to create a nation of learners, problem solvers, creative thinkers and innovators, who use learning and information as the basis of creating opportunity and keeping America great.

Read Leadership ideas here and here

--- end May 2023 --- 

In the above article I talked about "creating new leaders".  In one of the research articles I include this graphic, visualizing a strategy led by universities, funded by mega donors, that creates, and provides on-going support, for such leaders. 

You can find this graphic in this article. You can find more articles showing a sophisticated, long-term strategy, that universities could apply.  They just need donors to provide the motivation. 

Thanks for reading and sharing this article.

Find me on BlueSky, Twitter, Instagram, Mastodon, LinkedIn and Facebook (see links here).

If you want to help support my efforts please visit this page and send a small contribution to help Fund the Tutor/Mentor Institute, LLC. 

What are your volunteers learning?

I saw this post on Twitter this morning, from the Prison Policy Institute, which I point to from my newsletters and my library.

You can follow their posts on Twitter, or on BlueSky, at this link. If you don't live in a high poverty area you probably have never given a lot of thought to how the prison-industrial complex harms people in vulnerable situations and contributes to the on-going problems of persistent poverty.   Follow posts by Prison Policy Institute and others to expand your own understanding. Share these links with your network to increase the number of people who understand the problem and are willing to provide time, talent, dollars and votes toward solutions. 

I started collecting newspaper clips and research articles in the 1970s to expand my own understanding of why a volunteer-based tutor/mentor program was needed and how to lead a constantly improving program.  

I was digitizing some files yesterday when I found this 1994 opinion article by Mark Freedman, who wrote the book Kindness of Strangers.  It's titled "To Help the Young, We Need More Than Mentors". 

Click on this link to view the article in my Google Drive file.

I've built my understanding of the challenges facing kids and families living in areas of concentrated, persistent poverty over the past 50 years.   And, I've been sharing the resources I was learning from with volunteers in the tutor/mentor programs I led, so they could also expand their understanding.  

Because, mentoring alone is usually not enough.  And, volunteers who become informed and empowered can do much to remove many of the barriers, while also helping the tutor/mentor programs they serve sustain and constantly improve their efforts. Which means doing more to help the youth they mentor.

I created this concept map as a guide to articles in the Tutor/Mentor library. Anyone can access this map and dig into the library. Many of the links I point to are extensive resources themselves. 

You can find a link to the Prison Policy Initiative on this page along with many other related resources.

And, I created this concept map to show how volunteers grow over multiple years of involvement in well-organized tutor, mentor and learning programs. It shows my own efforts, and hopefully inspires the design and activities of other programs, in Chicago, and around the country. 

In this "Steps to Start a Tutor/Mentor Program" visual essay I quote Marc Freedman's comments about the potential and the difficulties of mentoring and his suggestion that without infrastructure and support for mentors and mentoring programs, the movement will never reach its potential.

Much of my work since forming the Tutor/Mentor Connection in 1993 and the Tutor/Mentor Institute, LLC in 2011 has focused on helping programs get the on-going resources needed to provide that infrastructure.

I've used my website, print and e-mail newsletters and blogs to share this information and to try to motivate volunteers to spend time learning and building a greater depth of understanding of why tutor/mentor programs are needed, where they are needed, what types of programs are needed, based on who the mentee is, and what other issues need to be addressed.

The goal has been to build a greater public commitment to the actions that need to be taken, and sustained for many years, to solve the problems that Prison Policy Institute and others highlight in their own media.

View this set of articles to see how I've written about "building public will".   

I point to several hundred youth serving organizations in lists on the Tutor/Mentor Institute, LLC website.  I try to open every link, at least once a year, to make sure they work and to see what the program is doing to educate volunteers and donors.  Some point to research showing why their programs are needed. Very few point to my library, or show "educating volunteers" as part of their core strategies.  

That might change if donors looked for such information on a program's website.  

I actually created a visual essay a few years ago which I titled "Shopping Guide".  

This shows some, but probably not all, of the information you should find on an on-going youth tutor, mentor and learning program website.  Programs won't put this information on line unless donors, volunteers and parents are looking for it and unless they have staff and/or volunteers who can put the information on-line.  If you know of programs doing a good job sharing similar information, please share links with me.

Let's connect. You can find me on LinkedIn, BlueSky, Facebook, Instagram, Treads, and Twitter (still).  Find links on this page. 

Thanks for reading. If you value the information I'm sharing, and the resources on the Tutor/Mentor website, please visit this page and make a contribution. 

Navigating Yourself Through Information Libraries

Facilitating understanding

I started building the Tutor/Mentor information library in the 1970s long before I knew of the Internet. I had majored in history in college in the 1960s then spent three years in US Army Intelligence.  I was sort of "hard wired" to seek out 'best available information' to use it for innovation and problem solving.

When I became a volunteer tutor in 1973 I started seeking ideas to support my weekly tutoring.  When I became the leader of that program in 1975 I expanded my search for ideas, reaching out to leaders of other programs in Chicago to see what I could learn from them (and what they could learn from me).

I held a full-time retail advertising job at the Montgomery Ward corporation with responsibilities that grew from 1973 to 1990.  When I started leading the tutoring program there were 100 pairs of elementary school kids and workplace volunteers. That number grew to 300 pairs by 1990.  There was no way I could personally train each of them to know all they needed to know, so I began to try to motivate them to be "active learners", digging into the library of information I had started collecting.  

At the tutoring program hosted by Montgomery Ward from 1970s-1999 the library started as four metal file cabinets, then expanded to a wall of shelves. When we moved to the 20th floor of the Montgomery Ward HQ tower in 1993 we had about 400 sq ft of space, just devoted to our library. It was open to our own volunteers and students, and to leaders of other tutor/mentor programs in Chicago. 

That physical library now is down to a few books on shelves in my home office. The library is now all on-line, which has been happening since 1998, while the space (and funds) available to operate began to shrink.  There's some sadness there, but to me, this is a blessing. The information is available to far more people now than it ever was in the 1990s.

From 1993 to 2000 I used printed newsletters to tell people about some of this information and encouraged them to visit the library at our Wards location.  Many of the tutor/mentor programs launched in the mid 1990s borrowed ideas from that library.  I hosted conferences every six months in Chicago and these became a place to gather new information and to help people understand the information and ideas within the library.

Home Page T/MC website - 1998

We started moving all this on-line in 1998 when one of the volunteers at the tutor/mentor program I was leading offered to build a website for us. We developed the graphic at the right for this first website to show our goal of connecting people from different backgrounds to the information, to each other, and to the Tutor/Mentor Connection. The page design was used help people navigate the information on the site. You could click on any of the blue circles and go to a section where we hosted lists of information/links to other people's websites.

I used email newsletters and blog articles, like this one, to encourage our own volunteers and donors, as well as people involved in other programs in Chicago, and around the USA, to dig into the library. 

Between 1998 and 2004 I saw a few examples where graphics like on our first website were interactive, meaning if you clicked on one of the blue circles it would move to the center of the wheel, and the spokes would be filled with new circles, showing sub categories of information related to that topic.  The Hub of Creativity and the early version of the Boston Indicators Project (both no longer available) were examples that I hoped to duplicate (but never was able to).

As the library continued to grow between 2000 and today the number of links grew and that made it more and more difficult for people to navigate the library.  In 2011 I worked with Debategraph and created an interactive site that shows the vision and strategy of the Tutor/Mentor Connection / Tutor/Mentor Institute, LLC.

Mentoring Kids to Careers on Debategraph - click here

When you click on any of the spokes it moves to the center of the wheel and new spokes appear. A narration at the right side of the page explains what that particular strategy focuses on.  This was a good example of the type of navigation tool I was envisioning in the late 1990s, but still did not focus on the various sections of the Tutor/Mentor web library.

Since 2005 I've used concept maps, created with cMapTools, to show the library.  

4 sections of web library

These are static, but they have layers of information. You can link from the cMap to sections of the library.  This map shows the four main sections. Thus, if you click on the small box at the bottom of each node, a new map appears.

In the late 2000s two interns from South Korea/IIT in Chicago built an animated version of the map.  This work was actually done by two different teams. One built it in the winter and the second updated links and added a voice narration in the spring of 2009.  You can see it below.

Resource Map - video

This was created in Flash animation which is no longer supported on many platforms. I created a YouTube video a couple of years ago so that it could still be viewed. It was really creative work.

The Debategraph map, cMaps and this animation all were a form of interactive navigation, intended to help people find, understand, and apply the ideas in the library to help kids in all poverty areas move through school and into adult lives.

This week if found a version of what I have been imagining for so long, on the World Economic Forum web site. This is a "strategic intelligence" map.  View this short video to understand its scope.

World Economic Forum - Strategic Intelligence 

Here's how this works.  On the home page of the WEF website are dozens of categories. Click on any one of these and a map like the one above opens. On this the hub of the wheel starts out stating the global issue, in this case "workforce and development". The spokes show a wide range of related issues. Click on any of those, and that becomes the center, with new spokes.  Notice the inner ring of circles. Click on any of these and related spokes on the outer ring will show up in blue.  Every time you refresh the map a list of resources appears in the box on the right side of the page.

I can't imagine what it costs to build and  maintain this.  I'd love to have someone step forward and build a similar platform to point to all the sections of my library.  This might be organized in several ways. For instance, I wrote a "War on Poverty" article several years ago and created the graphic below.

View PDF that describes this. 

The hub of the wheel might be "What are all the things we need to know and do to assure every youth born in a poverty area today is in a job, free of poverty, by his/her mid 20s?"  The spokes would be points 1 to 7 on this graphic, with an 8th being "using maps".

This same hub could be used with a different version, where the outer spokes would be all the sections and sub sections of the Tutor/Mentor library, and the inner spokes would be the four major categories shown in the cMap above.

Why is this important? Below are screenshots from today's Chicago Tribune, talking about the tragic killing of another child, and pointing out that we've been here in the past, and nothing  has changed.

I could have just as reasonably put in an image from the murder of George Floyd, or the Black Lives Matter Movement.  Both are related.

An information map, like the one the World Economic Forum built, should be created, with "How do we assure that all Black Lives Matter"  or "How do we end these killings?"   The outer circle would be created by people much more deeply informed than myself, but needs to be an exhaustive representation of "everything: "we need to know, and do, to reach a future where all Black Lives do Matter, and we have a much better world for every one to live and raise their kids.

I wrote this article earlier today, saying a Black Lives Matter information hub should be built. Maybe it already has been.  Here's another page from the WEF Strategic Intelligence site, focused on Systemic Racism.

Systemic Racism - click here

I'm not yet certain about what information is hosted, here, but I encourage you to take time to look.

I think the sub sections of the Tutor/Mentor library would be a useful resource for these platforms.

Getting "Everyone" involved

I think the 4-part strategy that I started following in 1994 would be useful, too.  The library I've built, that the World Economic Forum built, and that others, like the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals organizers have created, all represent "STEP 1", which is the information gathering, organizing, and sharing step.

In the War on Poverty graphic, STEP 7 focuses on "building and sustaining public will".  I feel this is where we have failed, over and over, for the past 30 years.  Too few spend time trying to figure ways to do this and too fee provide the on-going funding needed.

STEP 2 of the 4-part strategy focuses on building public interest and drawing more people to the information in the library, while STEP 3 involves an on-going process of facilitation, or helping people find, understand and learn ways to apply the information.

I'm doing STEP 2 and STEP 3 right now.

STEP 4 involves the use of maps, which are also part of STEP 1.  We must know where people need help and we must build tools that show the distribution of needed programs and resources, to assure that we're reaching ALL of those places.

STEP 4

What makes the Tutor/Mentor strategy unique is that in STEP 1 I've been building a list of Chicago and national Tutor and/or Mentor programs.  The result of more people looking at this information and learning ways to help is that more are looking at maps to determine what organizations in specific areas are doing needed work. Then they are looking in their own personal mirror and deciding how, and how much, to help.

They don't need to wait for a proposal. They have used the information in STEP 1 to know what types of programs work and they look on program websites to determine what these programs do and how to help them.  Then they call or e-Mail to volunteer, or send a check or electronic payment.

Educating more people to take various roles that sustain needed work in thousands of locations is work that must be included in any knowledge map.  To that end, I encourage you to visit Harold Jarche's blog and learn about Personal Knowledge Mastery.  

I've been writing about this since 2005, so there are many related articles that you can find by clicking on the tabs at the left side of this blog.  This article about systems thinking would be a good start.

I'm on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIN and Instagram (find links here).

If you value the ideas I'm sharing, a small contribution to help fund me would be welcome. Visit this page and use PayPal to send your help.

1-23-2025 update - this week I watched Online Landlord  Mapper describe the interactive features built into his new website.  You can view the video here.  These are the type of interactive features that I was trying to build into my websites as early as the late 1990s.  While we made progress, I was never able to maintain consistent funding to keep improving the sites, and now they are off-line, only available as archives.