Look at my lists of Chicago tutor, mentor and learning programs

I started building list of Chicago volunteer-based tutor/mentor programs in 1975 as I became the leader of the program at Montgomery Ward's Corporate Headquarters. I used it to invite programs to gather and share ideas, so I could find better ways to lead my own program. Over time the relationships are a big part of why I have stayed involved for so many years.

In 1993 we created the Tutor/Mentor Connection to build a better understanding of what programs were operating in Chicago and to draw more consistent media attention to ALL of them, not just our own. In January 1994 we launched this survey, asking programs to identify themselves, show what age group they serve and what type of tutor, mentor service they offered, as well as where they were located.

120 programs responded and we published that list in a printed directory in May 1994. We updated it annually each year through 2003.  At that point we put the information on-line so it would be available to more people.  View the 1996 Directory in this file.

The four maps below show how I divided the city and organized the information in the directory.

Chicago North

Chicago Central

Chicago South Central

Chicago South

I still host my lists, but have not done a formal survey for many years.  Below is how you now find the information on the Tutor/Mentor website.

Click here to view the page. I've added a few more categories over the past decade. Thus click into any of the lists below and get to know the programs. 
- Chicago North

- Chicago Central

- Chicago South Central

- Chicago South

- College Access - these programs focus on college and draw from many parts of the city

- Multiple Sites and/or Community Based - some programs have sites in each part of the city. Others don't work from sites as volunteers meet kids at community locations.  

- School-Based - My initial focus was site based non-school programs. However there are many tutor and/or mentor programs in Chicago schools

- Chicago Suburbs - this list is organized by North, West and South Suburbs, but over the past 30 years I've not found many organized tutor/mentor programs in these areas.  

While my primary focus has been on volunteer-based tutor/mentor programs I realized in the late 2000s that I should have a way of learning about programs with an arts, STEM, leadership, etc. focus. These programs also connect youth with volunteers.  So I built the page you see below. click here to open

Included on this page are other organizations who collect and share information about youth serving programs, as well as other intermediaries.  There's also a list of e-mentoring and e-tutoring. There's also a list showing programs beyond Chicago, who also can be models to learn from.  

The goal in creating these lists was that programs would show enough information about "how" they do what they do and "what" their long-term goals were that volunteers, parents and donors could make support decisions based on what they find on a website and that programs could learn and borrow ideas from each other so they are are constantly improving.

Some programs do a great job. 

Sadly.  I don't see enough of this. Lack of manpower to collect information and constantly update websites is probably the primary reason. 

Several years ago I created a "shopping guide" visual essay to show what I'd ideally find on program websites.  One role that technology and communications volunteers could take would be a help programs put this type of information on their websites. What if someone created a website "fill in the blanks" template, based on the Shopping Guide, and what they find on other program websites, then make this freely available to any program in the country?

I really depend on site visitors to help me keep these lists updated. If you find a link not working, or know of a program that should not be included, or should be added, or is in the wrong category. just reach out to me on LinkedIn and give me the information. 

As I wrote above, the goal has been to help volunteers, donors, media, parents and youth find programs near where kids live, and that fit their age group.  We launched this search page in 2004. It's now an archive but you can see it's purpose. 

In the graphic where I show the Chicago Programs lists I put a red line next to sections of the website that showed how we drew programs together for Tutor/Mentor Leadership and Networking Conferences and for annual Chicago-wide tutor/mentor volunteer recruitment campaigns.  While I no longer host these they are templates for what others could be doing in Chicago and other cities, IF they were maintaining a comprehensive list of programs.

Now that you know how these lists are organized can I count on you to share the information so more people use it to find and support youth-serving programs in the Chicago region?  Or, in your own community!

I've been drawing attention to these lists in many different ways since forming the Tutor/Mentor Connection in 1993.  But my voice is not enough. Thousands need to be following media stories, new research, and the calendar, and using their own creativity and media to draw attention to youth-serving programs throughout their city, not just the high-profile programs.

You're welcome to borrow ideas from this blog that show how I've been doing this.

Thanks for reading.  Please connect with me on LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, BlueSky, Mastodon and/or Twitter. see links here

And, if you see value in me hosting these lists, please visit this page and send a contribution to help me pay the bills!  Thank you.

Influencing Career Aspirations - Role of Business & Mentoring

I originally wrote this article in 2013.  Since the ideas still apply, I'm sharing it again, with a few edits and additions.

--- begin 2013 article ----

In this UK report titled "Nothing in Common: The Career Aspirations of Young Britons Mapped against Projected Labor Market Demands (2010-2020)" the authors show that career aspirations for many youth do not align with available jobs and call for greater business involvement with education efforts to change this.

This lack of alignment is probably as common in the US as in the UK. So what are businesses and mentoring programs doing about it? Since I've led a volunteer-based tutor/mentor program for over 35 years I've come to believe that having mentors from different business and professional backgrounds involved with young people can expand the types of career choices youth might aspire to. The image below shows young people in the Cabrini Connections program engaged in performance activities. One of those young people, Tramaine Montel Ford, is now a professional actor in New York, who says his "acting bug" started with the video program at Cabrini Connections.



At Cabrini Connections every teen was in a one-on-one match with volunteers from different business backgrounds. However, since this was a site-based program, other volunteers were also able to participate, organizing small learning groups (we called clubs) focused on technology, art, video, writing, dance, etc. These never had funding for consistent staff support so the level of activity from year to year was inconsistent, but they all provided a range of extra learning opportunities for the teens who participated.

In the mid 1990s I tried to create a new term for this type of mentoring program. I called it "Total Quality Mentoring (TQM)" borrowing from the business concept of Total Quality Management. I was describing a type of mentoring that had many different influences, and was constantly looking for ways to improve its impact by engaging the talents of volunteers and youth in all phases of program operations. This graphic was created to demonstrate this program model.

The center of the "wheel" is a youth, with the spokes representing the different types of influences that a program might expose the youth to via the volunteers who participate and the activities the program offers. This graphic also is the model for a "program" which recruits volunteers from different work backgrounds and recruits youth in elementary or middle school and works to keep them involved all through high school. As the Internet became available, this vision extends to building a life-long network connecting youth and volunteers with each other in a virtual support system.

Each spoke of the wheel has an arrow going both ways. Every time a volunteer interacts with a youth in a weekly tutor/mentor session he/she is learning something about that child and the community he/she lives in. Every week that volunteer informally shares what is learned with his friends, family and co-workers. The longer the volunteer stays involved, the greater his empathy/understanding grows and the more he is willing to do to support the youth, and often the program. This animation illustrates this service-learning loop. If volunteers are well-supported by consistent staff involvement, they will stay involved longer and many will begin to bring other volunteers, other learning opportunities, and even financial support, to the organization.

Read this 2013 Education Week article about the "eight conditions for student success" and see how "belonging" and "heroes" influence student aspirations.  I was first introduced to this in 1999 at a conference in Portland, Oregon.  It changed my termination from "motivating" students to "building student aspirations".   

Every spoke in the chart also points to a specific industry cluster that has different workforce readiness needs. In this graphic I emphasize the 12 years it takes to go from first grade through high school and the ways business could support this journey with volunteer involvement, technology, ideas and on-going funding. If companies were to look at this strategically, they could be supporting volunteers with ideas they could take to their tutor/mentor sessions. Thus, volunteers from engineering and manufacturing could be using clay and animation to teach thinking skills to elementary school kids, that might motivate aspirations for these types of careers. They also might organize field trips and job shadowing during middle school years. In addition they might offer part time jobs and internships during high school years, and even provide scholarship money and summer jobs during college years.

Here's a visual essay showing the Total Quality Mentoring idea - click here

In the above graphics you'll see inserts with maps showing high poverty areas of Chicago.  While this article shares ideas for helping individual tutor/mentor programs constantly improve, the overall goal of my articles is to help motivate donors, policy-makers and business leaders to provide the on-going resources needed to make mentor-rich non-school learning programs available to K-12 youth in every high poverty area of the Chicago region.  

If political leaders recognized the importance of this strategy they could be recruiting and recognizing companies from every industry who were adopting this strategy. The result would be that volunteers and financial support would be coming to each program in the city from many different sectors, creating a broader base of funding needed to ensure that each program had talented staff that would stay with these programs longer, and that youth were surrounded with volunteers modeling many different career aspirations, not just one or two.

If you are a volunteer, alumni, student, parent, donor, etc. you can share this idea with people in your network who are involved in different industries, or who are in media, entertainment and/or politics and who might provide encouragement for companies to adopt the Total Quality Mentoring model.

If you're being asked to contribute $50 million for a new anti-violence strategy wouldn't it make sense if this was also a workforce development strategy?

--- end 2013 article ---

I wrote this 13 years ago yet, the need is as great, or greater, today than it was then.  And with COVID, distance learning, and artificial intelligence, there are new issues to understand.

Since last December I've been posting graphics like this, showing who participated in one, more more, of the Tutor/Mentor Leadership and Networking Conferences that I hosted in Chicago every six months from May 1994 to May 2015. Browse these articles to see some of these. 

As I post articles like this one, my goal is that readers will share it with their networks and that this leads to people using the Open Source Mapping Tool created by the Fall 2025 IVMOOC team at Indiana University, to show who's connecting around these ideas.  

If  you're using these ideas or creating your own versions please connect with me on LinkedIn, BlueSky, Instagram, Mastodon, Facebook and/or Twitter to share your work. 

Finally, I depend on contributions from a small group of supporters to keep doing this work. If you'd like to help, visit this page. 

Engage Youth in Writing Activities

 In my September newsletter I featured a blog written by Sheri Edwards, a retired educator from Washington State. I met her in 2013 through the online #CLMOOC community and we've stayed connected since then. 

Below is a post Sheri made on Mastodon about the October National #WriteOut event. She points to this page on her blog. 

I follow Sheri and many other educators on several social media platforms. Many are involved in the annual #WriteOut event and share their work on social media and their own blogs.  You can learn about it on this page. 

I share this because every volunteer-based tutor, mentor and learning program, along with every school, could be using the #WriteOut event to stimulate student curiosity, reading and writing during October as volunteers are just beginning to build relationships with students, or at any other time of  the year.

In the programs I led, between 1975 and 2011, we included writing activities in October and throughout the year. We published what students wrote in our newsletters and in special publications, because one of the greatest motivations for writers is seeing their own words in print!

Below is the December 1978 newsletter, which at that time we called it "Monkee Words" after Montgomery Ward, which hosted the program. Many people referred to Wards as "Monkee Wards".

Scroll through the pages and you'll find many poems written by 2nd to 6th grade students. 

Below is a copy of the November 1983 newsletter. The name had been changed to Tutoring Tattler, which was used through 1992 (and might still be used by Tutoring Chicago). This shows winners of the Halloween writing contest and includes some student work.  

In the December 1986 Tutoring Tattler you can find information about that year's Christmas Writing activity.

By 1991 we were creating separate publications to share student writing.  Below is the October 1991 KidsWork. 

I left the original tutoring program in October 1992 and with a few volunteers formed Cabrini Connections, to help kids who aged out of the first program after 6th grade have continued support through high school. This is when we also created the Tutor/Mentor Connection, to share work we and others were doing to help programs like ours grow in more places.

We continued to encourage student writing and creative expression.  Below is the "WUZ UP! teen news from 1996.

Visit the Cabrini Blog and look on the right side. You'll see a link to the Writing Club, along with links to other creative learning activities, that expanded the tutor/mentor experience beyond the one-to-one tutor/mentor relationship.  This blog was active from 2006 to 2011 but was not continued after I left the organization in 2011.  While it is an archive now it offers many lessons others could borrow for their own programs.

In the Homework Help section of the Tutor/Mentor Institute, LLC website you'll find many more activities that you might use to engage students and volunteers on fund, creative and on-going learning and relationship-building.

I've been honored to be part of the Tutoring Chicago 60th Anniversary campaign, which has shared clips from an interview with me in several of their posts on LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram. I wrote about it in this post. 

I hope that this leads more people to my blog and websites so that more begin using the ideas and archives I share to build and sustain mentor-rich non-school programs that reach K-12 kids who live in high poverty, under-resourced, neighborhoods of Chicago and other places.

I hope it also encourages a few to reach out and help fund my work, or to help create a Tutor/Mentor Connection strategy on one, or many, college campuses.  You can find me on many social media platforms. See links on this page.

Thanks for reading. Enjoy a safe and fun Halloween weekend!

Drawing Attention & Resources to Chicago Tutor, Mentor and Learning Programs

 In 1993 when we did the planning that launched the Tutor/Mentor Connection in Chicago in January 1994, one goal was to "increase frequency of stories about tutoring/mentoring programs in order to build awareness for the tutor/mentor movement, individual organizations, and the need for such programs".

We launched a survey in January 1994 and published our list of programs in a printed Directory in May 1994.  

We put the list of programs on the Internet in the late 1990s and since then I've done all I could do to help each one get the attention, dollars, volunteers and ideas they need to operate and constantly improve.

Yesterday I posted an article encouraging programs to use social media to gather ideas and to share their own stories.  Today I'm going to share some images that I gathered over the past few weeks, which were posted by various tutor/mentor programs.

Polished Pebbles - view website.  Read article posted by Kelly Fair, founder of Polished Pebbles. 

Lawyers Lend-A-Hand to Youth - view website

Chicago Lights - view website

Youth Opportunity United - view website

Chicago Youth Programs - view website 

Midtown-Metro Achievement Centers - view website 

Chicago Scholars - view website 

Diamond in the Rough Youth Development Program, Inc. - view website 

Highsight Chicago - view website 

College Bound Opportunities - view website 

Tutoring Chicago - view website 

Daniel Murphy Scholarship Foundation - view website 

Project OneTen - view website

I'm sure there are a few others who have been posting regularly on social media, such as Big Brothers Big Sisters Chicago and Learning Edge Tutoring. 

I pointed to some of these in this article, from last September.  And, in this article, from October 2020.  And, in this article from 2019.

I point to my lists of programs, and to other sites with directories and lists of Chicago youth-serving organizations, in this article.

On the home page of www.tutormentorexchange.net you can find lists of Chicago programs posting on Facebook, Twitter (X), and Instagram. 

Do you see a pattern here?

If I can write articles that share images and website addresses for youth programs in Chicago, so can anyone else.  If you're in another city, write articles about programs in your own city.  

Thanks for reading and (hopefully) sharing this article.

Find me on many social media platforms (find links on this page). If you're writing articles like this, share them with me so I can share them with others.

Finally, if you can help me pay the bills, visit this page and send a contribution.  

Join the October Write-Out

I saw the post below by my friend Kevin Hodgson about the October Write-Out which is starting this week.

The link to the post is here, and the link to the Write-Out prompts is here

Kevin is part of the #clmooc group of educators that I have been networking with since 2013.  I've pointed to his blog often from my articles because of how he shares ideas that educators as well as non-school tutor, mentor and learning program staff, students and volunteers can use.

Here's a link to the stories he has posted this year, and in past years about the National Write-Out which is a partnership with the National Park Service. 

Since many volunteers have just been introduced to the students they will work with for the coming school year, this writing activity is a great way for them to get to know each others.  It's not too late to join the activities.  Furthermore, the archives will always be available for use throughout the year. 

I led a volunteer-based tutor/mentor program from 1975 to 2011 and several former volunteers have made donations over the past 12 years to help fund the Tutor/Mentor Institute, LLC.  I received a generous gift today from Kathy Cheevers, who was a volunteer in the 1980s!  Thank you.

For those who want to help, here is the link to my FundT/MI page. 

Recruiting Volunteers Continues

We launched the Tutor/Mentor Connection in Chicago with a program survey in January 1994.  Using this we created our first list of tutor/mentor programs, hosted a first Tutor/Mentor Leadership and Networking Conference in May 1994 and published our first printed Directory, also in May 1994.

In August/September 1995 we used our list and Directory to organize a Chicagoland Tutor/Mentor Volunteer Recruitment Campaign, intending to draw volunteers to all of the programs in our lists.  Below is a T/MC Report newsletter from 1996, reporting on that year's recruitment campaign. 

I'm still trying to help Chicago area youth tutor, mentor and learning programs attract volunteers and I invite others to help me.  Below are a few programs who are sharing their stories on social media.

This is Tutoring Chicago on Instagram. Visit their website. 

This is Polished Pebbles on Twitter. Visit their website.

This is Chicago Youth Programs on Instagram. Visit their website. 

This is Link Unlimited on Facebook. Visit their website.

This is Big Brothers Big Sisters of America on Twitter. Visit the BBBS Chicago website

This is Mercy Home on Twitter. Visit their website.

These are not the only youth programs sharing their stories on social media. Some of the programs shown above post on multiple platforms.  Too many programs don't post much on social media at all. 

I've created lists showing programs on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.  You can browse these lists, and follow any of the programs that interest you (or follow all of them).  I don't yet have a list for programs posting information on LinkedIn, but many do. So far I've not found any programs using Mastodon. 

Below is my map showing volunteer-based tutor, mentor and learning programs in the Chicago area.

Find the map and my complete list of programs on this page.  All you need to do is visit some of the websites, then create a JPG image from a page on one or two sites, then post that with a website link on any of your social media sites.

As more people take that role we'll all be helping K-12 kids in Chicago and other cities get the extra help they need to succeed in school and move on to adult live, jobs and careers.

Please help me keep my lists updated. If you find broken links, or know of programs that are no longer operating, or that should be on my lists, send the information to me.  

Please connect with me on any of the social media platforms that I point to at this link.

And, if you can help with a contribution to Fund the Tutor/Mentor Institute, LLC, please visit this page.