Ask not what Dan Bassill can do for you, but what you can do for Dan Bassill

A DePaul University student wrote a blog article last fall and ended it with "Ask not what Dan Bassill can do for you, but what you can do for Dan Bassill."

Over 35 years of leading a tutor/mentor program I've seen my role as being the one who makes it possible for everyone else to gather and do their thing at Cabrini Connections, or at a Tutor/Mentor Leadership and Networking Conference. When I see a group of teens and volunteers in a room, I can say "What I see, is because of me".

Without the efforts of myself and a few other leaders, such as Ray Dowdle of our Board of Directors, Cabrini Connections would be an empty space. Tables with no students and volunteers.



In fact, there would not even be a space with tables for youth and volunteers to meet on a regular basis, and for guest speakers like GLC to come and provide motivational messages to our teens and volunteers, as he did last night (see video).

Places are needed in many parts of Chicago and the suburbs where youth, volunteers, motivational speakers, technology and all sorts of extra learning are available. But without a core group of leaders who make the commitment to build and sustain these programs, often at great personal sacrifice, there will continue to be too few places where the tables are full and new connections are being made each week.

More than 5,000 students and volunteers have been part of the tutoring/mentoring programs I've led since 1975. I'm connected to many of these alumni on Facebook and Linked In as well as to former executives from the Montgomery Ward Corporation who provided the space and dollars for the program to operate until 1999.

While I've written countless letters, articles, email messages asking for help to build and sustain Cabrini Connections, and help similar programs grow all over the Chicago region, this DePaul student has said what I've not been able to communicate effectively in all these years.

Ask not what Dan Bassill can do for you, but what you can do to help Dan Bassill continue this effort for another decade or more.

* be a donor - send tax deducatable donations to Cabrini Connections, Tutor/Mentor Connection, 800 W. Huron, Chicago, Il. 60642. Or use this on-line PayPal form.

* Be a Network Builder - share the articles I write and information on our web sites with people in your own business, fraternity, faith group, etc.

Don't let the empty spaces be the future for tutor/mentor programs like Cabrini Connections.

Staying the course

Below is a page from one of the essays on the Tutor/Mentor Institute web site, which is one of several web sites where I share information.



In a letter I sent to a potential donor in March 1994 I wrote…

“T/MC is a network that will inventory every community in Chicago to identify tutoring/mentoring programs. Then we will continuously promote the need for tutoring and mentoring and volunteer involvement so that more programs become available in each coming year. We will provide a means of sharing successful strategies among new and existing programs and will identify and focus public attention --on a continuing basis--on the areas where tutoring services are most needed.”

This essay shows some of what we've done to keep this commitment over the past 16 years. This report shows impact since 2000 from the Cabrini Connections program we lead, and from the Tutor/Mentor Connection.

This chart shows growth of web traffic to our sites since 2000. This enables people from through the Chicago region, or the world, to use the information we collect and share.



The cost to recreate what we have spent 16 years building would be far more than what it takes to maintain this information base from year to year. If you would like to become a benefactor or sponsor and share the credit for this resource, please contact me or use this form to send a donation.

Advise for new Chicago Mayor

In today's Chicago Tribune on section offered advise from six Tribune writers. I'm usually able to link from my blog to these stories but I cannot find a reference to this on the Tribune's web site today.What I did not see was advise focused on mobilizing the talent, generosity and time of Chicago and suburban residents to help solve deeply ingrained problems. Maybe that is a "given" in what each expert offers, but I'd like to see this as a core commitment of the new Mayor.

The ideas we share are for him and other leaders to read, reflect and incorporate into their own leadership.

Imagine if this were the new Mayor's blog

I had a dream last night, where the new Mayor of Chicago, Rahm Emanuel, was using Tutor/Mentor Connection maps, blogs, and web sites as part of his commitment to helping all Chicago kids have brighter futures.

Maybe he would create an animation like this that illustrates his strategy.

He might show maps like this and the Tutor/Mentor Program locator, to illustrate his goal of supporting youth learning and mentoring in all high poverty neighborhoods, with business and faith involvement near places where they have facilities or where they do business.

He would be pointing people to the articles on the Tutor/Mentor Connection blogs, and to information about leadership roles hosted on the Tutor/Mentor Institute site.

He might even use his considerable power of persuasion, or excess campaign funds, to provide $5 million, or five years of funding, for the Tutor/Mentor Connection to help him achieve these goals.

This was just a dream. But if you show this to the mayor-elect or his supporters, maybe it can become a reality. Watch for more articles illustrating the dreams I've had about what the new Mayor and other leaders might do to help kids in poverty move through school and into jobs and careers.

Be like Mike. Be like El.

Starting a tutor/mentor program is easy. Keeping it going for a decade or more and constantly finding ways to get better is the hard part. This video was created to inspire volunteers and donors to raise money for the Cabrini Madness Fund Raising tournament.

Maybe from Cabrini Connections on Vimeo.

El Da'Sheon Nix and Bradley Troast,the leaders at Cabrini Connections, collaborate to lead the weekly program activities and to create these videos. The inspiration for this one came from the video below, featuring Michael Jordan.



It takes the work of many people, over many years, to help programs like Cabrini Connections become a fixture in the lives of inner city kids. I wrote this article last week to show how important Cabrini Madness is to our fund raising, and to increasing volunteer involvement and ownership in the overall vision of Cabrini Connections and the Tutor/Mentor Connection.

I use graphics like this to emphasize that we seek the engagement of people from every industry sector in this on-going process of innovation and program development, not just the people who are current tutors/mentors at Cabrini Connections.

If we want more kids born in poverty to have adult lives free from its chains, able to raise their own kids in diverse communities of greater hope and opportunity, we must "be like Mike" and "be like El" with the work and commitment we're willing to bring to the game every day.

Not all volunteering is the same.

One of the most valuable resources on Corporate Volunteering that I know of is a group from Canada called Realized Worth, which works with companies to design and implement outstanding corporate volunteering programs. This article titled "Not all Volunteer Programs are Created Equal" shows that if companies want greater impact from their volunteer programs, they need to encourage more than "done in a day" type projects.

In Washington last month 17 major corporations made commitments to reduce the high school drop out rate through their support of mentoring. I wonder if these companies have internal teams who are looking at information provided by groups like Realized Worth, or the Tutor/Mentor Connection, to support the way they encourage and support volunteer involvement in this field.

Below is a graphic that we've used to describe volunteer-involvement as a form of service learning.


Below is another graphic, showing how an intern from IIT has been building an updated version of this. It's not complete yet. No voice over. However, imagine how much more effective this might be if a team of volunteers from a graphics company or advertising agency were working on it.
You can play this animation at this link. Follow the work of our interns at this forum.

These animations were created using ideas we've posted in the Tutor/Mentor Institute library. If companies want to encourage meaningful long-term involvement in programs and strategies that affect the quality of the workforce, the poverty and quality of schools in cities where they do business or have facilities, and the overall cost of poverty in this country, the ideas of experts like Realized Worth and that we post on the T/MC site would be good starting places, as well as long-term knowledge bases.

Contact us at Cabrini Connections, Tutor/Mentor Connection if you'd like to become our partner in this effort.

Africa Connection

I went on to the Tutor/Mentor Connection forum this morning and saw that one of my African friends, Abdiel Kude, had created a new blog.

When I looked at it I was surprised to see my own photo with this message. "Two gentlemen have influenced my decision to start blogging. One of them is Dan F. Bassill of Cabrini Connections and TutorMentor Connections, Chicago, USA"

I often do Google searches for "tutor mentor" just to see where our ideas are being looked at and I've found sites in different parts of the world where ideas we created are being shared.

This illustrates how the Internet has changed how we work and who we help. It also changes the potential of who helps us. We don't need to depend just on Chicago philanthropy and volunteers, we can find help and give help in all parts of the world.

Using Social Media to Build Network

I've used this picture before to illustrate how small and insignificant if feel as I think about how big the world is and how complex the problems are that we're all dealing with.

I believed that the world changed dramatically with the Internet because of the ways it enables people from different places to connect, share ideas, and as Egypt has just demonstrated, change government structures.

However, there are many challenges to overcome. This blog shows five major technology hurdles that need to be solved.

I tried to post a comment, but the site did not seem to be working, so I decided to share my comment here.

Solving these five problems would help, but are any of you following examples of how these tools are being used to create networks of purpose. By that I mean people who work together to solve a common problem that is complex and may take many years to solve. For example, visit http://www.tutormentorexchange.net where you can see maps of Chicago showing all of the poverty regions. You can see graphics showing "school to work" which is a 20 year process for kids starting 1st grade today. You can see maps of the information people can learn from to support their own involvement.

Keeping this example in mind, apply it to what's happening in Egypt. Social media was used to bring a crowd together to bring change in the government, but can anyone point to a place on the web where people are mapping a 20-50 year process that would bring true change to the lives of poor people living in Egypt?

Harnessing the tools described in this blog is one step toward this goal, but working together to innovate and map solutions, then draw people and resources together on an on-going -- and dramatically growing -- basis to apply those solutions, still is a problem to be solved.

If you want to help the Tutor/Mentor Connection and Cabrini Connections build better understanding of the challenges facing inner city kids and the opportunities that mentor-rich programs offer, join us on the Tutor/Mentor Connection forum and help us the same way that other interns and volunteers are already involved.

Or use your wealth the way the Koch Brothers are to finance the work we're doing.

Local-Global Tutor/Mentor Strategy

The graphic below shows a map of Chicago where more than 200,000 school age youth live in high poverty neighborhoods. The arrow points to the Cabrini Green neighborhood on the Near North part of the city where we have operated the Cabrini Connections program since 1993. Before that I led the Montgomery Ward/Cabrini Green tutoring program from 1975 to 1992, which was hosted at the Wards corporate headquarters on Chicago Avenue (same neighborhood). Thus I've many years of experience in mobilizing volunteers and recruiting inner city kids to be part of weekly non-school tutor/mentor program activities. Leo was in 4th grade when we first me in 1973. We're still connected today. He has completed a new movie "Count It All Joy” that is an official selection in the 1st Annual Hollywood Christian Film Festival .

Tangela graduated from high school in the late 1990s. She's finished college and is in graduate school now. She was a speaker at our 2011 year end dinner. 

The Local-Global chart (above) illustrates my commitment to helping programs like Cabrini Connections be available to youth in all high poverty neighborhoods, as well as my understanding that without support from businesses, universities, faith groups and public leaders, we can't do as much as we need to do to help the teens at Cabrini Connections. 

In this series of articles I show what we accomplished over the past decade, and the financial challenges we faced. During the 18 years since we formed Cabrini Connections, Tutor/Mentor Connection our first commitment has always been to the teens we work directly with. Thus, when funds are tight, or when leaders don't support the Tutor/Mentor Connection, we continue to focus on work needed every day to help the teens and volunteers of Cabrini Connections stay connected. 

Chicago is going through a huge transition. Residents will elect a new Mayor and many new aldermen. We have a new Governor. We have two new leaders at Chicago Public Schools in Terry Mazany and Charles Payne.

I've shared information from the Tutor/Mentor Connection with these people and hundreds of other leaders every year since 1993. Here's an example.

Our use of maps has been available since 1994. Yet we still don't see much evidence of leaders using these ideas and we don't have much financial support for our efforts to help tutor/mentor programs grow in all parts of the Chicago region.

Thus, we continue to focus on helping the 70-80 teens and growing number of alumni of Cabrini Connections stay connected to volunteers and each other and to the library of information we've been collecting.

During February and March our students, volunteers and friends are involved in the 2nd Annual Cabrini Madness competition, where teams compete to see who can raise the most money to support the ongoing operations of Cabrini Connections.

I hope you'll join a team and help us. I hope you'll share these ideas in your business, faith group and college to help similar programs reach youth in more places.

Schools will be major test for next mayor

How many times have you heard the statement "your preaching to the chior" meaning the people you're talking to already are deeply committed to what you are talking about?

To me, that's the problem with anti-poverty and school reform efforts. There are too few people who don't live in poverty, but do vote, and do control wealth and jobs, who are personally connected and engaged. How many leaders do you know who incorporate the leadership strategies shown here?

In today's Chicago Tribune, one article's headline was "Schools will be major test for next mayor"

I wish voters in Chicago actually were holding the Mayor and other elected officials accountable for what they do to improve student learning. If that were true we might have had a new mayor in Chicago more than once over the past 18 years.

If that were true candidates and voters might be reading the map articles we post on the Tutor/Mentor and Mapping for Justice blogs. Philanthropist and corporate sponsors might be providing funds to help us create these maps and share information about tutor/mentor programs in Chicago.



While maps can show where poverty and poorly performing schools are located, and if there are any non-school tutor/mentor programs in a neighborhood, voters and leaders still need to do their own homework to know more about the poverty gap, and why it is a critical issue that affects all of us, not just the poor. This web site is one resource we'd point to.

When most people think about tutoring/mentoring they ask about the impact on kids. That's important, and the goal, but I've been trying to get the Mayor and other leaders to step back and think of this from a larger perspective.

Think about how long-term involvement in a mentoring program creates a bond between the youth and volunteer and how the volunteer learns more about the challenges of inner city poverty through this experience. Mentoring in well-organized, long-term programs connects people who don't live in poverty with those who do. Many of the volunteers who get involved stay connected to youth for many years. Many become donors and help build capacity of the schools and/or non-school programs they work with.

If we cannot increase the resources available, and sustain these consistently for many years, how can we expect to help a youth entering an inner-city school today be graduating with a college and career plan in 12 years.

With public funds shrinking, how can we expand private sector involvement?

When we think of volunteer-based tutoring/mentoring I feel we need to think of how transforming the volunteer can create new leaders and new sources of ideas, talent and dollars to support all of the afterschool programs the candidates for Mayor are talking about.

Thus leaders need to be thinking of strategies that support the infrastructure of existing programs and help new programs grow where none now exist.

I wrote about this in this blog article, and an intern from the University of Michigan created this animated presentation to interpret this concept. You can see more ideas like this on this page.




If Mayor Daley had embraced the ideas we were offering him since we first met in the early 1990s perhaps there would be a much broader distribution of volunteer-based tutor/mentor programs in Chicago. Perhaps there would be thousands of people like me who grew up outside of Chicago without any exposure to poverty or to minorities who now spend 50 hours or more a week working to help Chicago kids expand their networks and learning opportunities.

We cannot change what is past. Whoever is elected in Chicago and other cities this year can change what happens in the future. We'd like to help these leaders understand and use the information we've been collecting and sharing for the past 18 years.

If you're connected to one of the candidates why not introduce us. Maybe they can incorporate some of these ideas in their campaign platforms and implement them when they get elected.

Building Future Impact

At the end of January "more than 17 U.S. corporations made commitments to expand or create mentoring programs that increase graduation rates among America's youth and position them for success".

We want to help them keep this commitment. Please read more.

In past articles we've used this graphic to illustrate the infrastructure needed at places like Cabrini Connections to attract youth and volunteers and support them so they stay connected for many years.

We use maps and graphics like this to illustrate that Chicago needs high quality tutor/mentor programs in every poverty neighborhood and that every non profit tutor/mentor program has the same need for visibility, volunteers, operating dollars, technology, ideas, highly motivated staff, etc. This article illustrates how we create animated graphics to help people understand and respond to this message.

When I talk to volunteers and leaders of Cabrini Connections I find myself constantly scratching out the same concept over and over. So I've created the chart below.

This chart illustrates that a company's impact can grow if they begin to plan further in advance, and if they apply the same process improvement tools that they use to grow their business. This chart shows a 12 month cycle of events that supports what happens at schools and non-school tutor/mentor programs. For instance, in May and June school is ending. This is when we should be celebrating what happened in tutor/mentor programs, while also sharing ideas that can be used to make each tutor/mentor program better when school starts in the fall.




In August, when school starts and every tutor/mentor program is looking for volunteers, corporate communications and advertising could be encouraging volunteers to get involved in many locations, if they were pointing to program locator databases like the T/MC maintains. In September and October company workplace fund raising campaigns could be encouraging other employees to make donations to support the infrastructure at places were some employees are tutors/mentors.

In November there's an opportunity for programs to come together and share ideas, and celebrate the volunteers and kids who have joined tutor/mentor programs in the fall. This publicity can help recruit more volunteers to be tutors/mentors, and some volunteers to be tech support, communicators, accountants, etc. It can also motivate more donors to make year-end donations during the holiday season to support tutor/mentor programs.

By next January, there could be a wealth of actions that have taken place in the previous 12 months, that could be celebrated, shared, and used to stimulate involvement of more businesses and more volunteers during the next 12-month cycle.

This planning cycle is describe in this pdf essay. It does not change from year to year. What we hope changes is the number of businesses who take on leadership roles, and the number of volunteers and operating dollars that begin to flow to ALL of the volunteer-based tutor/mentor programs operating in Chicago and other cities.

This graphic shows that what happens in the month following the Mentoring Summit and the corporate announcement is small compared to what could happen in three, six, nine and 12 months or in two to five years if corporate leaders recruit and empower marketing teams to grow the company's involvement and to plan ahead so they maximize and grow their own impact from year to year.

This animated presentation shows this quarterly event cycle.

If people who read this article pass it on to corporate managers and CEOs some will see this as a business strategy that they can apply which will engage more of their employees and customers and have a greater impact on reducing the drop out rate while also improving employee skills, informal networks and loyalty to the companies that supports this process.

If you'd like to have me come and talk to your company about these ideas we'd be more than willing to help.

Snow Day. Connecting Networks

Part of the strategy of the Tutor/Mentor Connection is to increase the number of people looking at information we collect and share so they begin to take actions that make more and better tutor/mentor programs available.

We've never had much money to advertise, so we've looked for other ways to share our ideas. We've been part of blog exchanges since 2005.

Today an article I wrote is featured on the Empowered.org web site blog. In this article I share my own ideas about building networks of people who focus on common goals.

Empowered.org is one of a growing number of platforms that "empowers groups to mobilize for their desired social change. From small grass-roots clubs to complex international organizations, Empowered.org provides a flexible platform to fundraise and recruit/coordinate volunteers."

The challenge I see for these groups is competing with each other for non-profits and supporters who will spend enough time on the site to raise a significant level of funds for the cause they support. Small non profits don't have the manpower to maintain an identity on all of these sites. Their volunteers are fragmented, and have even less time to do marketing and mobilization.

I think that by inviting me to be part of a blog-exchange they've taken a step that gets more of our attention than do other sites that I've been part of in the past. The test will be if any of our Cabrini Connections, Tutor/Mentor Connection followers or peers go on the site and set up meaningful actions that help us achieve our mission.

Youth murders up; money for CPS program in doubt

I encourage you to read this article on Catalyst Chicago's web site showing that the Chicago Public School Culture of Calm program is barely getting off the ground as its funding runs dry.

This program has spent more than $10 million to help less than 250 of Chicago's highest risk youth. Imagine if Tutor/Mentor Connection had just a million dollars a year to help youth in every high poverty neighborhood have better access to non-school tutor/mentor programs.

Recommended viewing from Cabrini Connections

While you're home on snow day, or sick day, here's some videos I hope you'll view.



See more like this at http://www.cabriniconnections.net/video

Want to help? Send a donation.

Snow day project. Study maps.

If you're snowed in at home tomorrow, why not spend some time looking at the interactive map page of the Tutor/Mentor Program Locator. You can use this to learn what (if any) tutor/mentor programs are in different parts of the Chicago area. You can sort by age group to see how well distributed such programs are, and how well we're reaching kids at different age levels.

If you click on the green stars on the map which indicate locations of tutoring and/or mentoring programs, you can go to an organization's web site. If you look at enough of these web sites you can begin to form your own opinion about which are doing good work and which need to improve. This users guide pdf shows the features of the Program Locator.

If you know of a tutor/mentor program that is not on the map, just contact the T/MC to get them added. If you see improvements that need to be made to the Program Locator, help us find a donor like the one who gave $50,000 in late 2007 to build this capacity.

In addition, you can skim through some of the web sites on this section of the Tutor/Mentor Connection web site to learn more about how poverty influences learning and school performance and how tutor/mentor programs like Cabrini Connections are a form of bridging social capital connection kids to people and experiences beyond the neighborhoods they live in.

Then read about challenges non profits face. I know most people don't want to think about this but if we want high quality, constantly improving tutor/mentor programs in more places, for more years we need to help them overcome these challenges. You can also read some of our ideas showing what leaders in business, faith groups, hospitals and colleges can do to mobilize support for tutor/mentor programs.

Finally, look at your giving budget and see if you can send a donation to Cabrini Connections or one of the other programs on this list. You can also give your time doing one of these volunteer roles. While this list shows opportunities at Cabrini Connections, I suspect most non profit tutor/mentor progams need help in similar areas.

If you and others spend just a few hours every couple of months looking at this information, you will know more about ways you can help inner city kids, and you will know more people who you might want to help.

Collaboration & Tower of Babel. Deep thinking.

With the Internet we are now connected to people living in all parts of the world. With language translators available on Google and other places we can now understand each others words.

Will this lead to future joint efforts to solve world problems? Is this possible?

I've been doing a lot of thinking about the Biblical story of the Tower of Babel. I'm not a Biblical scholar, so today I did some searching and came up with a web site that provides a number of articles worth reading.

This is the text from Genesis 11:1-9

"Now the whole earth had one language and few words. And as men migrated from the east, they found a plain in the land of Shinar and settled there. And they said to one another, 'Come, let us make bricks, and burn them thoroughly.' And they had brick for stone, and bitumen for mortar. Then they said, 'Come, let us build ourselves a city, and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.' And the LORD came down to see the city and the tower, which the sons of men had built. And the LORD said, 'Behold, they are one people, and they have all one language; and this is only the beginning of what they will do; and nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them. Come, let us go down, and there confuse their language, that they may not understand one another's speech.' So the LORD scattered them abroad from there over the face of all the earth, and they left off building the city.' Therefore its name was called Babel, because there the LORD confused the language of all the earth; and from there the LORD scattered them abroad over the face of all the earth." (Genesis 11:1-9)

I highlighted nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them because this is where I struggle in my thinking.

Everything I've been trying to do through the Tutor/Mentor Connection and Cabrini Connections is get people to learn from a common body of aggregated information and apply that understanding in efforts to make programs and services available that help poor kids grow up better prepared for lives out of poverty.

Yet while the Internet gives us access to each other and an unlimited range of ideas, it also creates a proliferation of places with their own gravitational pull, making it more and more difficult to build the critical mass of people involved in any single place.

Is this just a continuation, or 21st Century version, of The Tower of Babel Story?

I've much more learning and thinking to do on this topic. What are your thoughts? Have you tried to bring people together to solve a problem but you seem to meet with resistance in many different ways?

Map of Linkedin Network

This map was built using a tool that shows you a visual depiction of your Linked in professional network. You can build your own map by going to this link. See my map here.

What's the purpose?

I'm connected to 577 people on Linked in. Some are from my college. Some are former Montgomery Ward execs. Some are peers. Some make giving decisions at foundations and corporations. Many are people who share the same concerns I focus on.

My goal is that every day these people are reading my blog, looking at the links I point to and making an effort to share this information in their own network. My goal is that every day some of these people are sending us the resources (people, dollars, ideas) that it takes to operate Cabrini Connections, Tutor/Mentor Connection so we can do more to help people in this network use our ideas and the ideas of each other to help build more and better volunteer-based tutor/mentor programs in Chicago and other cities.

This pdf describes what I mean by "building a network of purpose".

What does your network look like? How are you "nudging" it every day to help you with your own personal vision of creating a better future for kids in the world and for your own children and grandchildren?

Little Organization. Big Vision.

Last night the President ended the State of the Union address by quoting an employee of a small Michigan company who said "We're a little company but we do big things."

If you've read any of the articles I've posted you'll see that Cabrini Connections, Tutor/Mentor Connection is a small organization with a big vision, and a growing impact.

On the national level, a Mentoring Summit just ended in Washington, DC, and big corporations have made a pledge to support mentoring. First Lady Michelle Obama was quoted as saying "The idea that we have behind all these initiatives isn’t simply to create a series of one-time experiences for just a small number of kids. It’s about encouraging more caring adults to step up and make mentoring a part of their lives."

At Cabrini Connections we're launching our 2nd Annual Cabrini Madness event,where volunteers, students and friends form teams and compete to see which team can raise the most money for CC, T/MC by the time the NCAA basketball championship game is held in early April. Last year 112 students/volunteers raised over $23,000.

I was invited to be part of one team, and sent the following message to the leaders. I hope that this will be passed on to corporate leaders who are making a national commitment to support mentoring.

First, I hope that our team and other teams will draw from the ideas in the blog articles I post and the essays at http://www.tutormentorexchange.net

These use the "wheel" as a common image. Below is a chart I first created almost 16 years ago. It still is the model for a mentor-rich organization that seeks to have a long-term impact on youth and volunteers involved.


One way to look at this is as the "student" at the hub of the wheel. In this case the spokes would be pointing to the different people and different influences that would help that student through school and into a job.

Note that if you start mentoring a youth in first grade it takes 12 years for that student to finish high school. The major challenge to non-profits offering mentoring and learning support is to find the on-going FUNDING needed to provide consistent, age-appropriate learning and mentoring for this many years.

Another way to look at the "wheel" is that the hub is a "place" like Cabrini Connections and the spokes are all of the volunteers who participate each week. Together we reach more kids and offer more diversity of career modeling and support. This video gives a tour of Cabrini Connections.

Program walkthrough from Cabrini Connections on Vimeo.

In Cabrini Madness the hub of the "wheel" is each student, volunteer and team and the spokes lead to the people they know and networks they are part of (work, family, college, faith, etc.). If during the first three months of each year we can show people in our networks how important it is for them to help us, some will send donations, and some groups may organize activities on a year-round basis that help us.

One example of this is the Lawyers Lend A Hand Program in Chicago which is now raising money and visibility and awarding over $200,000 in grants to different tutor/mentor programs each year. In 1994 when I first reached out to them with a vision of supporting tutor/mentor programs all over the city , they were giving one $2k grant.....which went to Arne Duncan's Ariel Tutoring Program in Hyde Park.

We need a "lawyers for Cabrini Connections, T/MC" group that has people in the legal community working each week to recruit volunteers and donors to support our efforts. We also need support from every other industry shown on our "business wheel" so we have a diverse mix of volunteers mentoring our kids, and a diverse mix of funders making sure we have the resources needed to support their employee volunteers and constantly improve our impact on kids.

However, Chicago and America, need corporate and political leaders who use maps like we show here and here to develop leadership and program support strategies that enable tutor/mentor programs to grow and reach youth in all of the neighborhoods with high poverty and poorly performing schools. Using business maps in their planning, companies can develop strategies that reach many parts of a city, instead of just supporting a few well-known programs.

As this article says "The problem is not public schools, its poverty".

If our students and volunteers tell their stories of involvement in Cabrini Connections, or in any other tutoring/mentoring program, using blogs and videos and in other creative ways, they can attract the attention of growing groups of people who may support us throughout the year.

However, if corporate American and the President, Governor and Mayor adopt these ideas they will begin to provide the consistent resources that every tutor/mentor program in America needs to connect kids and volunteers with each other, and with extra learning and enrichment (see our Success Steps) so that by 2015 the nation will begin to see an eruption of kids from poverty neighborhoods who are leaving high school better prepared for 21st century adult responsibilities and jobs.

Mr. President, we're in your home town. You spoke at the Tutor/Mentor Leadership and Networking Conference in 1999. Your Secretary of Education led a non-school tutoring program. I introduced the T/MC concept to your wife almost 15 years ago when she was at the University of Chicago.

I'd be happy to help you learn to adopt and use these ideas. You can help us do big things with them.

Bring Your Game - Must See Video

Below is a video featuring many high profile African American entertainers and sports figures giving a message of education as the path to opportunity. If you're a parent, teacher, mentor or big brother, try to get the kids you are working with to watch this.

Watch more free documentaries

Once you've watched this there are a couple of questions I'd like you to reflect on

a) if the teachers in inner city schools don't know this video exists, or are not interested in showing it, how will the kids see it?

b) if parents or guardians in inner city neighborhoods are not using the Internet, or don't know about this video, or can't motivate their kids to watch it, how will the kids see it

c) if there's a Boys & Girls Club, non-school tutor/mentor programs and/or YMCA with technology and youth workers in the neighborhood,they could be showing this to the kids who attend, but many neighborhoods don't have such programs.

So, what are the celebrities who are featured in this video doing to help create revenue and visibility streams that provide the resources to youth serving organizations in inner city neighborhoods so that kids not only see this video, but have men and women in their lives to help them understand the message and incorporate it into their lives?

Introduce those leaders to the Tutor/Mentor Connection and they can use our ideas and their visibility and power to help make tutor/mentor programs available in more places.

Connecting the Network

Here are a few places where the Tutor/Mentor Connection is mentioned and/or active in the discussion.

We The People blog, written by Jordan Hesterman. This year-end recap shows how she was active in the 2010 Tutor/Mentor Conferences.

The Adler School of Professional Psychology Blog - this article points to the blog being written by Joseph Kruel, who is doing a six month internship with the Tutor/Mentor Connection.

I-Open - skim articles on this Facebook page and see how this group based in Ohio is sharing T/MC ideas with its followers.

Social Edge, Dictionary of Links discussion - this is a way that T/MC shares ideas with social entrepreneurs around the world.

I often do a Google search for different combination of "tutor mentor" such as "mentor collaboration" just to see the many different places where I've been active or where others are pointing to our web sites. Often times I'm surprised to find that people in different parts of the world are sharing our ideas.

My purpose is to find ways to increase the frequency of our stories and the number of people we reach so that we can find donors, benefactors, leaders, university partners, etc. who will help us achieve the mission we've set for the Cabrini Connections, Tutor/Mentor Connection programs.

Twitter network activity

This link goes to a Twitter Mention map where I created this graphic showing people I've been connecting with recently. If I create a map like this on the fourth Monday of each month in 2011 it should show how my network grows.

Since the embedded link is live, I suspect this will change every day I created a static image using a screen shot and Adobe Photoshop. Compare this to the live map each time you look at the blog and see how the network changes based on my activity on Twitter.

Anyone else using this to map your network-building efforts?

My Twitter is @tutormentorteam

Dan Bassill Podcast with YNPN Houston

I was the guest speaker in the first "Mentoring Conversations with Local Leaders" podcast of the YNPN Houston network of volunteer. Listen to the 45 minute interview at YNPN Podcast (I used Windows Media Player to listen to this.)

My emphasis was on the marketing and infrastructure development needed to support the growth of high quality tutor/mentor programs in any city. The leadership to make this happen could be taken by a school, a business, a hospital, a non profit, or a combination of all of these groups. These leadership ideas can help.

We'd like to be your partner and/or consultant so you can learn from us and borrow concepts we've been developing for the past 35 years.

Tipping Points - Do You Agree?

The purpose of the Tutor/Mentor Connection blog is to share ideas that help more volunteers connect with inner-city k-12 youth in structured, volunteer-based non-school tutor/mentor programs. I've lead a program like this for 35 years which is where my ideas come from. You can browse the Cabrini Connections web site and borrow any ideas you want from what we share.

If you agree that it takes an organized structure like we try to provide at Cabrini Connections to enable volunteers from beyond poverty to connect and stay connected to kids living in poverty, then wouldn't the next logical step be to think of strategies that would make such programs available to more kids in the entire Chicago region?

On January 25 a National Mentoring Summit will be held in Washington, DC. The T/MC won't be represented because we don't have the money to attend. Yet, our ideas can be represented by the way we share them via the Internet.

Here are a few ideas I'd like to have people think about. First, if we want great tutor/mentor programs to reach kids in all poverty neighborhoods, we need to find ways to help each program that is operating get a more consistent flow of operating resources.


Second, we need to support intermediary organizations in each city who will maintain a database of existing non-school tutor/mentor programs, and share this on map-based directories like the Tutor/Mentor Connection does. With the map anyone in the city can see where poverty and poorly performing schools are located. These are areas where kids, families and schools need more help. Tutor/Mentor programs cannot grow in all of these neighborhoods if they don't get more consistent help.

Third, we need to be finding ways to sustain this strategy for decades, not one to three years. This chart emphasizes that it still takes 12 years to go from first grade to 12th grade. How many donors maintain consistent funding to an agency for that many years?

We've taken time to think these ideas through and communicate them in illustrated essays on the Institute section of the Tutor/Mentor Connection. Two ideas that you might read and share at the National Summit, and in your own business and faith community are:

Logic Model - If you agree with the logic, help us make it a reality.

Tipping Points - What are some of the actions that could dramatically change the availability and impact of programs helping youth born in an inner-city neighborhood be in a job and starting a career by age 25?

I encourage you to visit our Tutor/Mentor Forum and see how interns are helping us communicate these ideas in new and more creative ways. Join the forum, add your own ideas, and apply this thinking to help an entire city of tutor/mentor programs grow in Chicago and other cities around the country.

The problem is not public schools; it is poverty.

I encourage you to read this article, titled "Got Dough? How Billionaires Rule Our Schools".

Then review strategies and ideas the Tutor/Mentor Connection proposes to expand the network of support for youth in high poverty neighborhoods of Chicago and other cities.

You can use this blog as a text book if you like. Each category on the left expresses a set of ideas. All categories are interconnected in one over-arching strategy.

If it's your first time visiting the T/MC and you are overwhelmed by the amount of information, start here, or here, and spend time each week throughout the year building your understanding of the information we share.

Want to help youth living in high poverty?

The Tutor/Mentor Connection (T/MC) collects and shares information that anyone can use to build personal and/organizational strategies that reach more k-12 youth living in high poverty areas and help them stay in school, stay safer in non-school hours, expand their network of adult support, and move toward graduation, advanced education and to jobs and careers.

We focus on actions that need to be repeated over and over for many years in many places of Chicago and other cities. Such actions would lead to high-quality, mentor rich programs operating in inner city neighborhoods. The information we share is intended to be used by our own volunteers, students, staff, leaders and donors at Cabrini Connections, the program we lead.

It's also intended to be use by others in the for-profit world, education, and the non-profit world. In fact, if leaders in business, religion, health care and universities adopt this leadership strategy, employees can form tutor/mentor support teams using the ideas we share.

As we enter a new year and a new decade staff and volunteers at Cabrini Connections are beginning to plan 2011 events. In a meeting last night someone asked "what roles are we looking to fill on the year-end dinner committee?"

Since we want to empower many teams of volunteers and students to support different activities and events throughout the year, I thought I'd share some ideas that I've learned over the past 35 years of leading a volunteer-based tutor/mentor program.

I'm not going to write a long blog article, instead I encourage you to open this "Steps to Start a Program" pdf and use it as a guide in forming teams that want to have an impact.



Here's a screen shot of one of the pages in this "Operating Principles" pdf which focuses on good planning.



This page of the "Operating Principles" pdf focuses on types of talents that need to be part of an effective committee.



Do you have someone who can be the project manager for your committee? Or someone who is an effective communicator? Perhaps the most important role is that of a "recruiter" who can find people with these talents and bring them onto a committee or a board.

If you want to help Cabrini Connections, Tutor/Mentor Connection please take a look at this planning guide and identify the skills and talents you might contribute to one or more of the project described on this list.

If you're with a company and can form teams like this, your team can help Cabrini Connections and every other tutor/mentor program in Chicago and other cities by the way it mobilizes resources and points them to individual organizations.

If you find these ideas useful please let us know. If you can help us share them, or can help provide the funding that goes into developing them, we'd like to hear from you.

What Are You Willing to Do?

I read this article today, showing how we need to trigger an emotional connection in order for social media to result in an outpouring of support for a product, service or a social cause like tutoring/mentoring.

This led me to thinking of a campaign we might launch in 2011. What crazy things are you willing to do to support Cabrini Connections, the Tutor/Mentor Connection, or your own favorite tutor/mentor program? I'd stand on my head, or create a photo that looks like I am.

What would you do? How would you use video, animation, social media, to share your story? Don't just think about it, do it!

National Mentoring Month - Who Mentors Business?

During January Mentoring Month different celebrities and media will be talking about Mentoring and how it enriches the lives of youth and volunteers who become connected through organized mentoring programs.

I found this graphic in a planning tool titled Business Engagement Shareholder's Wheel. This is one of a series of training materials provided by Corporate Voices for Working Families.

As we celebrate mentoring, I encourage volunteers to organize study groups within their companies, colleges and faith groups, so others can learn how important it is to provide a steady flow of resources to support high-quality, constantly improving, tutor/mentor programs in every part of every city in America.

The Leadership Ideas that we share through the Tutor/Mentor Connection are intended to encourage people who can provide time, talent and dollars, as well as jobs and other types of community support, on a proactive basis, to all the different tutor/mentor programs operating in the same space.

Instead of thousands of non-profits trying to find a few donors, how about innovating ways that thousands of donors are reach out to find ways to support the non-school tutoring/mentoring programs that enable these connections between youth and volunteers to take place?

In Chicago you can use the Tutor/Mentor Program Locator to search for programs by zip code or by sections of the city. On the National Mentoring Partnership web site you can enter a zip code and find programs throughout the country.

Cabrini Connections is one of those programs in Chicago that could benefit from more consistent donor support throughout the year. If volunteers carry this message back to their networks they can generate this type of support with the stories they tell about their own mentoring experiences.

Evidence that inequality leads to shorter life spans,

I encourage you to read this New York Times article by Nicholad Kristof which says "There’s growing evidence that the toll of our stunning inequality is not just economic but also is a melancholy of the soul. The upshot appears to be high rates of violent crime, high narcotics use, high teenage birthrates and even high rates of heart disease."

He's pointing to a book by two distinguished British epidemiologists, Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett. I followed the links and came to a web site called The Equality Trust which shows that "large income inequalities within societies damage the social fabric and the quality of life for everyone."

The maps we show on this blog and at Mapping for Justice, as well as the poverty and social capital articles we point to on the Tutor/Mentor Connection sites emphasize this point. They also are tools that people who don't live in poverty can use to help create programs and services that bridge the gaps between rich an poor.

Volunteer-based tutor/mentor programs located in high poverty areas, like Cabrini Connections, can be places that connect youth and families from poverty with ideas, experiences, ideas and adults from non poverty areas.

You can learn what programs operate in Chicago using the Interactive map and Program Links provided on our web sites. If you compare programs you can begin so see which have more comprehensive and long-term strategies than others. You can borrow ideas from one or more on a continuous basis, so over time every neighborhood has world-class programs.

That can only happen if resource providers are actively engaged in this process and if intermediaries like T/MC are funded so they can host this information and bring people together on a continuous basis.

January is National Mentoring Month. Pick one or two programs and make a commitment to support them with time, talent and dollars for the next few years. Set aside part of your support for the Tutor/Mentor Connection so we can support your efforts.

New Year. New Decade. New Hope.

Happy 2011 to all of you. I hope your year is full of good health, happiness and prosperity.

  I hope that all of those who read the articles posted will find the messages of the past year inspirational, informative and useful to you.

 I hope you'll use the tags like chapter titles, and will read through past articles. If you're a teacher or volunteer leader I encourage you to use this as curriculum to teach students to identify problems, propose and define solutions, and mobilize people to work with them to put those solutions into practice.

 There are many heroes to look to for inspiration. I've been a GIRAFFE HERO since 1997. Like the Tutor/Mentor Connection, this organization finds it difficult to find donations to support its intermediary and leadership role. I hope you'll help them, as you help me.

 In fact, the links we point to in all of our articles, and that we connect with our information maps, point to thousands of social entrepreneurs that need consistent, flexible funding in order to do the work they do.

 This is our challenge in 2011.

We need to create blueprints showing all of the sub-contractors and workers that need to be involved in helping youth move from birth to work. We also need to find ways to create daily visibility that can compete with sports, music, reality tv, politics and other media, to draw eyeballs to our information, and dollars, volunteers and talent to all of the different organizations who enter 2011 competing with each other to find these resources.

 If we can find ways to do this in 2011 and the next decade we can move a bit closer to closing the poverty gaps and fixing some of the problems that we face.

 These blog articles and our email newsletters are always intended as and INVITATION for any reader to reach out to us, join our T/MC Collaboration forum, invite us to your planning forums, or share this information with your own network.

 The T/MC OHATS is a place some of us can document what actions we take that will lead to more and better tutor/mentor programs reaching inner city kids. If you'd like to be added as a recorder, or if you're a writer who can help us make sense of this data just reach out to us.

 We're a small non profit with a big vision. This map shows the range of talents we seek to work with us as volunteers and partners.

 If you're trying to keep a New Year's Resolution about making a difference in your community, or the world, we can help you and you can help us.