What motivates me

If you've read any of the articles posted on this blog since 2005 you'll see that I'm constantly advocating for the growth of comprehensive, long-term, volunteer-based tutor, mentor and learning programs that operate in non-school hours and connect k-12 kids living in high poverty areas with adults who work in a wide range of industries and have many different backgrounds.

What drives this passion?  Experience.

I led one volunteer-based program from 1975 to 1992. It served 2nd to 6th grade kids. I led it as a volunteer while holding a full-time retail advertising job until 1990, then became the first paid executive director when we turned it into a non-profit organization in mid 1990.

Below are two of the yearbooks that I created for that program.

The first if the 1976-77 yearbook.   View at this link. About 100 pairs of kids and volunteers were involved.

The second is the 1988-89 yearbook.  View at this link.  Over 280 2nd to 6th grade kids and 300 workplace volunteers were involved that year. 

When I joined as a volunteer tutor in 1973 the program was already eight-years-old.  I became its leader in the 10th year.  We grew over the next 15 years because of the organization I brought to the program and the way we engaged volunteers as leaders, not just tutors and mentors.  

I left that program in October 1992 and with the help of six other volunteers we formed a new program, called Cabrini Connections, to help kids who aged out of the first program after 6th grade have continued support all the way through high school.

Below is the 1994-1995 annual report for Cabrini Connections. View at this link. 

Below is the annual report for 2008-09.  We stopped doing print versions around 2000 and did PPT reports through 2010.  Here is the link.

Here's a folder with Cabrini Connections-Tutor/Mentor Connection Annual Reports from 1995 to 2010. Each report shows the activities that we offered to support student and volunteer involvement.  If you lead a program you might duplicate some of this work in your own program.

We held the first sessions of the Cabrini Connections program in January 1993, meeting with some teens monthly at Wells High School and others every Saturday morning at St. Joseph's Church on the North side of Cabrini-Green.  We were reaching 42 kids by June of 1993.

Then in the fall of 1993 Montgomery Ward gave us an entire floor of their corporate tower, over 20,000 sq ft of space, and we began expanding. 

If you view page 6 of the 1994-95 annual report you'll see how the number of students enrolled grew from 42 in June 1993 to 90 in the fall of 1995.  Page 7 of the report shows similar growth in the number of volunteers, from 30 in spring 1993 to 103 in the fall of 1995.

By 1998 our graduating class of high school seniors included five teens.  In 1999 it was nine. Thus the size of the program did not grow much since seniors were graduating each spring. 

In 1999 everything changed. Montgomery Ward was sold and we had to move to rented space in Cabrini Green to continue operating.  We lost Wards as our major donor in 2000 after they went out of business. And we lost many more donors in 2001 and 2002 due to the financial crisis after the 9/11 attack and the Dot-Com melt-down. 

Our move to rented space meant we had a much smaller facility for two years. Then we moved to a bit larger space on Huron, near the intersection of Halsted and Chicago Avenue. Our average enrollment from 2000 to 2010 remained at about 80 teens and 100 volunteers.   Open this PDF and see photos showing the 10 years from 1993 to 2003. 

In 2010, I created a report showing a decade of work. On page 10, I show HS graduates each year from 1997 to 2010. View that report at this link. 

We did all of this while also building the Tutor/Mentor Connection, to help similar  programs grow in all high poverty areas of Chicago. 

In November 1992 when we decided to form Cabrini Connections we realized that one more small non profit could be life changing for a few teens, but would have little impact on the more than 200,000 kids living in high poverty areas of Chicago. So we decided to split our resources and create an intermediary that could help tutor/mentor programs grow in many places.  We spent all of 1993 doing research and planning and launched in January 1994 with our first survey to learn about other tutor/mentor programs in the city and suburbs.  That led to our first published Directory of Programs and first Tutor/Mentor Leadership and Networking Conference in May 1994, and first citywide Tutor/Mentor Volunteer Recruitment Campaign in August/September 1995.

In each of the annual reports from 1995 through 2010 you can see work done to help tutor/mentor programs, including our own, get the resources they need.  If  you look through the articles I've tagged with "history" and "archives" you can see more evidence of what we were doing.

Then browse through the sections of www.tutormentorexchange.net and see everything that is available to help tutor/mentor programs start and grow and to help leaders be more consistent and strategic in supporting them.  

I often said that I was an effective leader of the Tutor/Mentor Connection because I also led a single tutor/mentor program. I knew how hard it was to attract kids and volunteers and keep them coming week-to-week and year-to-year. I knew how difficult and frustrating it was to attract and keep donors.  

Yet I've often heard from parents and alumni how important our program was to them.  I often heard from people in other places how much they appreciated what the Tutor/Mentor Connection was doing.

In all these years I've really only had one mentee, which was Leo Hall, who I was matched with in the fall of 1973, when he was entering 4th grade. We met weekly during the school year for the  next 3 years.  After 6th grade Leo continued to volunteer to help the program as one of the Junior Assistants who passed out milk and coffee. So we stayed connected.

I did not take another single youth as a mentee because as leader of the program, they ALL were my mentees.

I received a call from Leo this morning. He spotted a scam on Instagram, where someone had set up a duplicate account, using my profile picture. I reported it, and so did a couple of other people and that account has been removed.  I'm at https://www.instagram.com/danielf.bassill/ on Instagram. 

As we talked Leo told me to expect a call from an event organizer who was putting together his 60th birthday celebration. He wanted me to be there, or to record a video, if I could not be there.

Thus, my own experiences leading a single tutor/mentor program drive my passion and make me a credible advocate for cities building and sustaining  volunteer-based tutor/mentor programs.

The other thing driving my work is this front page from the October 15, 1992 Chicago SunTimes, following the shooting death of a 7-year-old boy in Cabrini Green.   The headline says "7-Year-Old's Death at Cabrini Requires Action".

If you open this folder you'll see many similar stories that I've collected over the past 30 years. They "Demand Action" but very few follow that with the type of on-going effort I have modeled.

Which is not enough.

As I talked to Leo today I again encourage him to use his own talents to amplify my "call to action" and to encourage other alumni to do the same.  As I write my blog articles I encourage you to share them and get other people involved.

Be like Dan.

You can't just say "ENOUGH". 

You need to act regularly to draw people to information they can use to be better informed and to be motivated to use their time, talent, dollars and votes to build and sustain volunteer-based tutor/mentor programs in more places and to help remove the structural racism that has roots extending back over 300 years in America.

I think I've written enough for today.  Please connect with me on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram and other platforms and share my posts with your network.  

And, if you can spare a dime, please visit this page and make a contribution to help me keep these archives and my library available to you and others. 

Just Don't Forget

Almost every day I'm on social media or working on a letter to supporters and include the message "Read my blog!".  I say "Visit http://tutormentor.blogspot.com and dig through the archives to see what I've been writing for the past 18 years (since I started the blog in 2005)".

Today I took my own advice. I looked at a couple of articles I wrote in 2005 and saw messages that I wish leaders had been seeing and responding to in the years since then.

In October 2005 I wrote an article with this headline: "As charities vie for donations, how can we help donors navigate the choices?" 

---- text from Oct 2005 article ---- Last Wednesday the Chicago Tribune had a front page/back page story devoted to Breast Cancer Month. The goal of the article was to help donors choose which charity to support. It was a great article, and great exposure for Breast Cancer charities.

Among the suggestions to donors was one that said this: Pick a goal. It might be research toward a cure, or advocacy, or patient support services. Then pick a charity that serves that goal and stick with it.

The article quoted Sandra Miniutti of Charity Navigator who said "We tell donors, if they want to change something in the world, they need to develop a relationship with the charity. Continue to support them over time, so they can keep their costs down and track whether they do what they claim to be doing."

That applies to funding youth tutor/mentor programs, too.

In May, I posted an article showing how difficult it is for non profits to sustain their work because of the inconsistent flow of dollars caused by a system that does not support flexible, long-term problem solving very well.

The Tutor/Mentor Connection focuses on connecting workplace volunteers with inner city kids in long term programs that result in the kids starting jobs/careers by age 25, with the volunteers still connected and helping to set up job interviews.

If a youth joins a program at age 10 it takes 15 years to achieve this goal. Unless donors chose charities that offer this service and stick with them for most of these 15 years, it's not likely that the program will survive long enough to still be a meeting place for a youth and adult at a time when the youth might be looking for help finding a job.

---- end October 2005 article ----

Then I looked at this article posted just before Memorial Day, May 2005. It's very relevant, as the nation is ramping up for the 2024 general election.  

--- text from May 2005 article---

This weekend is going to provide a visible opportunity for those who are elected leaders, and those who want to be elected leaders, to use the memory of those who died to preserve democracy to once again show what hypocrites they all are. 

Why do I believe this? Because while public figures and media honor those who fought and died in traditional wars, few encourage this same degree of personal sacrifice in the war on poverty, racism, and inequality in America.

Why do I believe this? Because few will use their daily visibility to encourage citizens and corporations to be involved in community service. The volunteer button and donate button on the web sites of most politicians points to a place where you can learn how to help them get elected or stay elected, not to a place where your time, talent and dollars help a youth born in poverty have a pipeline of adult and business support that assures that he will be in a job/career by age 25.

On Monday evening, almost every TV station in America will have a few video clips of local parades and local celebrities who march in these parades. Yet few will point to a place on their own web site where citizens are encouraged to learn about the issues of poverty, or where they can become a volunteer, leader, donor or business partner with a community organization working to help a young person move to a career.

Yet, during the year there will be many occasions where newspapers, TV and/or radio, write stories with headlines like:

These are our children, By JOSEPH R. WALL

Locked Out at a Young Age, By BOB HERBERT, New York Times

Seldom do these stories include web site address where you can read research posted on the Internet by organizations like Chapin Hall Center for Children, Public/Private Ventures or Voices 4 Illinois Kids.

Why we should get involved, only leads to questions of where?, and to how?.

Poverty is not something that ends with a sound byte. It takes 25 years for a youth born in poverty today to reach age 25. Statistics show that many inner city kids won't be alive then, many will be in jail, and too many will have dropped out of school and have little hope for a positive future...all because too few leaders today and in the past have been willing to make the ultimate sacrifice to create a system that reaches these kids and sustains consistent support until they are out of poverty and in careers.

You can read some of these statistics on the web site of the Alternative Schools Network of Chicago (http://www.asnchicago.org).

Thus, we need to also point to web sites where complex ideas are being discussed and broken down to components, like job responsibilities are broken down among thousands of contractors who will be building the new Trump Tower in Chicago. The engineers building the Trump Tower know that first you need a vision, second you need a plan, third you need financing (maybe this comes second), fourth you need a blueprint, and fifth, you start at the foundation, then build the project a floor at a time.

In raising kids or ending poverty, the nation has no vision, no plan, no financing, no blueprint, and we're starting all over the place and wondering why we're not being successful.

Random acts of kindness don't build a building and don't raise a child. Change will only occur when people learn to get involved and stay involved, often repeating the same actions over and over for many years.

For instance, giving money to a tutor/mentor program is an action that needs to repeat from year to year. Foundations that provide seed money then expect someone else to sustain the project are wasting money when no donors come forward to build the next stages of the project.

Corporations who want better educated workers, or a more diverse workforce, need to fund the pipeline, from preschool all the way to employment. Focusing workplace payroll deduction fund raising on tutor/mentor programs would be one way to provide a consistent flow of dollars into youth serving organizations.

What does this mean to the leaders walking in Monday's parades, or to the media covering them? (or those campaigning for 2024 elections?)

It means we need to find ways to draw attention to this work every day of the year, not just one day of the year. And we need to use the Internet as a place to host information and connect those who want to help with places where they can be reinforcements. We need to teach reporters, editors, columnist to put web links at the end of each story, so that each story leads to a path of involvement. 

 In October 1992 when six other volunteers and I created Cabrini Connections and the Tutor/Mentor Connection, a little boy named Dantrell Davis had just been shot and killed while walking to school in Cabrini Green. This led to public outrage and full-page stories in Chicago's major newspapers.

On the front page of the October 15, 1992 Chicago Sun-Times, the headline was "THE KILLING GROUND". The sub head was "7-Year-Old's Death at Cabrini Requires Action" In this front page editorial, the Editor of the Sun-Times wrote, "This isn't something you can let the other guy be indignant over. It's past time for you to take responsibility for solving the problems of Chicago. Please don't let this be someone else's problem. It's yours. It's mine. Let's retake our city and begin working to solve the horribly destructive problems of poverty, hopelessness and racism."

I have this front page posted on the wall outside of my office so that myself and everyone in our organization is reminded of this responsibility every day. Once a year I send this to the Sun-Times to encourage them not to forget.

Yet, I'm disappointed that our media and so few of our leaders are using Memorial Day and other public occasions to keep this memory and this challenge alive. I'm disappointed that our leaders and celebrities are not yet using the potential of the Internet to connect those who can help with information that shows why they are needed, where they are needed, how long they need to stay involved, and ways they can contribute time, talent, dollars, to win the war on poverty.

I want to think that at some parade in the future, some of the heroes that we remember on Memorial Day will be people who dedicated their lives to winning the war on poverty in America and in the world. Maybe if we do that we won't have to have so many young men and women fighting and dying in wars that have their roots in poverty, racism and hopelessness.

--- end May 2005 article ---

This is a timeless message. I've embedded that SunTimes image in many article on this blog.  Yet, too few are listening.

That's why I've posted this article today.  I started out saying "read my blog" and I'm finishing by saying "read my blog". 

Then, share it with others using the many communications tools that are available to you.  Do this at least once a month. More often, if you can.

Thanks for reading.

You can find me on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Mastodon, Bluesky and many other places. Please connect. Share these ideas. Carry them forward for the next 20 years.