How will you feel on Nov. 6, 2024?

I'm not sure you've noticed, but there's a huge election coming in a few weeks.  I'm hopeful the winner will be Kamala Harris and Tim Walz and scared to death that it won't happen.  Or, that she'll win, but not have a majority in the Senate and the House, meaning gridlock over the next four years.

I already voted. I urge you to make a plan and vote. Don't sit this one out.

But, what comes next?  What issues does a Harris/Walz team need to address.  The photo above is from the official Kamala Harris for President website. Visit this page to look at the issues she is focused on. 

A couple of weeks ago I posted an article with this concept map.

I think many of the topics on my map are issues she plans to address.  I hope someone in her team will take a look and see if they are missing anything.  I feel that without creating maps like this, showing all issues that need to be addressed, and showing places where resources are needed, we end up doing the right thing at the wrong time, or for not long enough, or in too few places.  

That's the reason engineers and construction workers use blueprints. They show ALL of the work that needs to be done, in the sequence it should happen.

Without applying this thinking to solving complex problems, progress is slow, if at all.  

I'm going to try something new with this article.  I've posted some paragraphs from past blog articles that I hope someone from Harris/Walz will take time to read.  These are ideas I've been sharing since the 1990s.  Too few have ever seen them. Too few have adopted them. 

You can click the image to enlarge and read the graphic. Then I hope you'll use the link provided at go to the article. Read it. Think about it. Share it.

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I've only highlighted five articles.  I've written more than 1200 since 2005. Many have the same ideas and the same focus.  

In many of my articles I emphasize a use of maps to show where people need help, and to assure an even distribution of resources to EVERY area where help is needed, not just to the most visible or the most well connected.   Here's one example. 

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While I've addressed this article to the people who I hope will be our next President and Vice President, these ideas are for leaders in every city and state, both in the private and the public sector.  

Building interconnected web libraries that make "all that is known" available and easier to understand and apply, then an on-going public education campaign that teaches people to visit this information and use it to innovate solutions to complex problems, is a path forward. 

The big challenge is that too few have the resources, or motivation, to build such libraries and keep them updated for 20-30 years like I have.  This is an ideal project for universities to be doing, using a constant flow of student talent to collect and share the resources, then to use them during their alumni years.  

Most universities do some of this work already. But most don't connect to libraries in other places, and other universities, in an interconnected web of knowledge.  That's what I feel should be happening. 

If you know of examples where this is being done, please share the link in the comment section. 

Thanks for reading, and sharing my article.  Please reach out and connect with me on social media platforms, like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Mastodon, BlueSky, Instagram, etc.  Find links on this page.

Finally, please consider a contribution to help me continue this work. Visit this page.

Dave Winer - a blogger for 30 years!

One thing that constantly humbles me is that no matter how much I put in the Tutor/Mentor library, it is only a small fraction of what is happening in the world.

Here's an example. A couple of days ago I saw a post on Twitter from Harold Jarche, about Dave Winer, who started blogging 30 years ago.

I've followed Harold and other pioneers of Internet networking and learning for many years and include links to his website in my library.  However, I don't recall every seeing a post by Dave Winer.   I started following him, like I do so many others. 

Today I saw this post by Dave, pointing to an article on the Daring Fireball blog (another that I did not know about, which has archives dating back to 2002). 

The article ends with this praise:

"He has such a distinctive writing voice that is impossible to imagine in any medium other than the web. But I think that’s because he helped define what writing not just on the web, but for the web, even meant."

Here's a post on Twitter by Harold Jarche, who has been writing about "Personal Knowledge Mastery" for the 20 years I've followed him.  Many of my own articles about learning parallel some of Harold's ideas.

Since I'm doing shout-outs to some of the pioneers who I've learned from over the past 30 years, Howard Rheingold, should also be recognized.  Here's a post that Howard shared on Mastodon.Cloud, about creating online community nearly 30 years ago. 

He points to this page.

In another post Howard points to an archive of Whole Earth publications (open here) , started in the 1990s. 

If you visit this section of the Tutor/Mentor library you'll find links to blogs written by Harold and Howard, and many others who I've added over the past 20 years.  I added a link to Dave Winer's blog today.  This is one of four sets of blog links in this part of the library.  

That's a lot of information and ideas!

I've used this graphic for many years to illustrate the constant learning required of a volunteer, staff member and/or leader in an organized non-school tutor/mentor program.   These are habits we want to build in the kids we tutor and mentor, and to our own kids!

You can see it in this article titled "Building Personal Learning Habits - Solving Complex Problems".

If you read the article you'll see that it points to the work of Harold Jarche and shows how I've tried to create a learning culture in the tutor/mentor programs I led, starting back in 1973 when I first became a volunteer and started to seek out ideas.  

 I started this blog in 2005, so am a youngster, compared to Dave Winer. I think my writing style is choppy, learned through writing retail advertising for 17 years.  I also could have benefitted from some of the auto correct features now available.  I cringe when looking at some of the typos in past letters and visual essays.  

But, I keep writing because there are still thousands of kids living in areas of persistent poverty in Chicago and other cities, rural areas and reservations around the country.  In each place, if someone is building a library like mine, they create a wealth of information people could use to build and sustain efforts that do more to reach kids and help them through school and into adult lives free of poverty's grip.

I've been digitizing my files and am almost complete. Now I've a lot of organizing to do.  However, unless I find someone(s) to take ownership of my work and use it as a teaching tool, thought starter, and reminder of the persistence that is needed, it will be lost forever in just a few years.

Here's a presentation I was able to create, drawing from my archives. It shows my outreach to universities in Chicago, the US and abroad over the past 30 years.  It includes links to many original documents showing work student interns did to help me build Cabrini Connections, the Tutor/Mentor Connection, and Tutor/Mentor Institute, LLC.

It's an example of the type of presentation student researchers could be creating to show others what information is available in my library.

I saw another post by Dave Winer today saying "It’s time for people who make their online home on Twitter to find a new home in the social media world. This place is a haven for fascism. We really don’t belong here anymore."

That's sad, because without Twitter we might never have connected.  I've started accounts on other platforms (see links here) but it took me 15 years to build my small network on Twitter.  I don't have that much time to rebuild on another platform, but I'll try. 

If you value what I'm sharing please consider a contribution to support my work. Visit this page. 

Connecting networks. The Tutor/Mentor Conferences 1994-2015

I started connecting with other people beyond Chicago via letters, telephone, and the traditional media during the 1980s and by email and on-line list serves in the 1990s.  The first Tutor/Mentor Connection web site was built for me by the brother of one of my tutoring program volunteers in 1997 and a new version was built by another one of our volunteers in 1998, then rebuilt again in 2006 by a team from IUPUI. That site hosted the Tutor/Mentor library, which I moved to the Tutor/Mentor Institute, LLC site in 2019.

I began participating in email list discussions around 1995 and have continued for nearly 30 years. Through this I have grown my connections and commitments to on-line learning, network-building, mapping and collaboration, even though many of the people who have the money to fund my work are not yet using the Internet the same way.

I started participating in cMOOCs that connect people and ideas in on-line, open and on-going efforts in the early 2000s.  In 2004 we hosted our first eConference, in partnership with IUPUI.  We repeated these in 2005 and 2006, in the same time frames as we hosted face-to-face conferences in Chicago.  

I joined a "connected learning MOOC" (#clmooc) in 2013 which encourages participants to learn new ideas and share what they are learning on blogs, and different social media platforms.  I've stayed connected to participants from that group since then. A few have become financial supporters of the Tutor/Mentor Institute, LLC.

In 2016, as a result of participating in this type of learning for several years, I posted a conference history story map on the Tutor/Mentor Exchange site after seeing a similar map done by someone else.

Click here to see my version.

I shared this link with #clmooc friends via Twitter and Terry Elliott, who I've written about before (see story), put my presentation on YouTube and added music to it. You can see it below.



Every time I or someone else posts an article related to the mission of the  Tutor/Mentor Connection and Tutor/Mentor Institute, LLC, my hope is that others will do what Terry did, and what student interns have done often between 2006 and 2015, and create their own versions and interpretations, which they share with their own network.

One group of people who played an important role during the late 2000s, who I've not featured often enough, were the Northwestern University graduates who served one year fellowships with my organization.  

I asked each one to write a blog, chronicling their experiences, starting with day one, and ending with a final reflection.  The first was Nicole White, who joined us in the summer of 2007. After her fellowship year we were able to employ her in 2008 and 2009 as a full-time Tutor/Mentor Connection coordinator, with a grant from the Lawyers Lend-a-Hand Program at the Chicago Bar Foundation.  

Since this article is about the Tutor/Mentor Leadership and Networking Conferences, I encourage you to visit Nicole's blog and scroll through the articles she wrote about the five conferences that she was part of.  

You can read the blogs of Nicole and our three other Northwestern University fellows (Chris Warren, Bradley Troast and Karina Walker) on this site, and you can meet other interns from various colleges on that blog, too.

I hope you'll take time to view these.  Making sense of what we're doing, or trying to do, is an on-going challenge. Blogs written by staff, students and volunteers add a deeper perspective to the work we do and hopefully motivate donors to not only support us, but to support other programs, in other places, who are doing similar work, AND, telling their stories via blog articles.

Furthermore, they enable leaders and volunteers from different programs to see our strategies and borrow ideas that they might put into their own programs.  Learning from each other has been the goal of my networking and web library since the 1970s.

I've put together a concept map that aggregates links to blogs of people who have helped amplify and shape the ideas I've been sharing.  I'd like to be adding others. Just send me a link to any stories you create.

While I've not had the funds to host a Tutor/Mentor Conference since 2015, I'm still connecting people and ideas to help youth tutor, mentor and learning programs grow in all high poverty areas of Chicago and other cities.

This photo was taken in 1994 during the second full year of creating the Cabrini Connections program in Chicago.  It shares a vision of adults and kids connecting in on-going programs that I continue to spread through this blog, my website, email newsletter and social media.

I hope you'll connect with me. Share your own stories and links to your blog and visual essays. Visit this page to see where you can find me on social media.

Finally, I hope you'll consider a contribution to help fund the Tutor/Mentor Institute, LLC.  Visit this page for information. 

Disaster Recovery, Mentoring Kids to Careers - Long Term Commitment Needed

The Southeast part of the United States has been hit by a massive hurricane, with rain and flooding extending into several states, affecting millions of people. 

This map is from The Weather Channel, in this article posted on Sept. 27, 2024. 

The flooding is on-going as I write this. Clean-up, recovery, then re-building will come in the next few weeks, months and years.  

This reminded me of an article I wrote in September 2017, following the hurricane that hit Texas and Louisiana.  My message now, is the same as it was then. I hope you'll read it.

---- begin 9-2017 article ----

Recovery efforts are now taking place in Texas, Louisiana and other places in the world where floods have caused recent human tragedy.
At the same time, school is starting in Chicago and other places, including in flooded areas, and kids living in high poverty areas are facing an on-going human tragedy of too little support from home, community and school.

There are some common challenges in both areas.

see this map

I launched the Tutor/Mentor Connection (T/MC) in 1993 in an effort to build a master data-base of non-school tutor and/or mentor programs operating in the Chicago region, in an effort to provide information that leaders in business, politics, education, philanthropy, etc. could use to determine if there were enough programs serving different age groups in all of the city's high poverty neighborhoods.  My goal was that the maps and database I was hosting would be used to support on-going public education and marketing plans intended to draw ideas and resources to programs, while helping programs network and learn from each other.

The goal was to have great programs in every neighborhood, not a few great programs in only a few places.

 You can find my list of programs and most updated map here.

In the years since it has served as a resource for parents, social workers, librarians, etc. to help parents find services for their kids.  Just last week I received a message saying,

"Looking for Mentoring programs for young girls and boys  from the age of 7-16 years of age in the Near North Area."

Over the past 23 year's I've responded to these requests by pointing people to the directory and list of programs, so they could shop and choose from what was available. I've often had to say "none there", which means you and your community need to start programs if your kids are to be served. I've offered the information on my web sites as a resource for such efforts.

I've never had much help doing this, and even less since 2011, however, the need still exists.  Thus, I seek volunteers and partners who will help me keep the information up-to-date and help build awareness so more people use the resource. View this presentation then read more below.

Community Information Collection: A Shared Effort by Daniel F. Bassill on Scribd

Without a map showing where help is needed and what organizations are providing services, with layers showing age group served and type of programs offered, it's impossible to know if a city has enough needed services in all the places where they are needed.

I seek people who will:

a) adopt a section of the city and review youth program web sites; make sure they are working; tell me of broken links, or new programs that I need to add. Get to know what these programs do, and how they differ from each other. Share news about these programs via social media, blogs, church bulletins, company newsletters, etc.

b) dig deeper into the theory of change and design of programs. Look at similar programs throughout the country/world and build a list of "what looks best" type programs that others can learn from.  Update this regularly.  Build an understanding of what type of program design is best for the needs of different age groups and client groups.

c) help me update my own technology and communications capacity. Look for ways to share ownership and carry this into the future.  This is all part of a four-part strategy described in this article.

Now, how does this relate to disaster relief?

https://weather.com map

Without maps showing the areas flooded by the recent Hurricane, with overlays showing service providers needed at different stages of recovery, high profile areas like Houston will draw most of the recovery resources while lesser visibility areas will receive too little.  Even within Houston it's likely that more affluent neighborhoods will attract greater support than the high poverty areas.

2024 note: To illustrate the difficulty of keeping attention focused on disaster areas for many years, the links in this 2017 article that are in bold face, are no longer working. 

For instance, https://weather.com and  this ESRI site provides numerous maps showing flood areas.  The maps are professionally done and provide great information about where the damage was greatest.  However, they don't include overlays of recovery support organizations who need volunteer and donor help to do their work.

Here's a site, called "harvyneeds.org" that is showing resources people are looking for, with a map showing shelters.  SketchCity, a tech group in Texas, has been creating some information-based maps, like the one showing shelters.

This is all useful, but is it enough?

What help do kids in poverty need? What help do disaster recovery areas need?  I've been using cMaps to create a visual blueprint that shows different supports kids need as they move through school and into jobs and careers.

http://tinyurl.com/TMI-K-CareerMentoring

These supports are needed in every high poverty neighborhood for many years. Thus far, I know of no one collecting and mapping such information, like I describe in the presentation shown above, to show availability,  and provide support, for all of these needed services.

Here's a HBR article talking about the impact of Harvey on poor people and advocating for prevention efforts, before the disaster occurs. Here's another from the Washington Post. Many issues mentioned in these articles represent nodes on a concept map like mine.

Concept maps and other visual tools could be used to show the various short and long-term disaster recovery support needed, not just in Houston, but throughout the world.

Visualizations like mine might already be available some place within the US and worldwide disaster-relief ecosystem.  If they are I don't see people on social media pointing to these and calling on volunteers and donors to use them to guide their efforts.

I don't know. Maybe readers who do know will share links.

What I do know is that many volunteers, donors and leaders are needed to collect, organize and maintain such information, and keep it updated for many years.  And many more are needed to build the daily and on-going marketing and communications needed to draw volunteers and donors to the information, and then to all of the areas where kids, or disaster victims, need help, now, and will need help many years more into the future.

---- end 2017 article ---

If you're creating websites with links that connect recovery efforts with resources and provide maps that encourage a distribution of resources to all the affected areas,  please share links in the comment section of this article and on social media.  Hopefully such websites will still be active five or six years from now.

This is not the first time I've written about using maps to distribute resources to all areas affected by natural or man-made disasters.  I wrote this article in 2005, the first year of hosting this blog.

While it's too early to have this conversation, Hurricane Helene comes just five weeks before our national and state elections, which will determine the future direction of the United States.  The disaster area covers such a large area of a few key states that I expect to find articles soon that try to figure out which candidate will be hurt the most, or will benefit the most.  

That's crazy to be thinking about now, but one party wants to cut public funding for disaster relief and climate action. The other wants to invest in solutions and build opportunity in communities across the country.  People who have lost their homes, and maybe all personal identification, will struggle to vote.  What states will make it easier for them?  

If you've read this article, thank you.  Our consistent, on-going, attention to these issues will be needed in the next few years, and the next few decades.

While disaster relief will be seeking donations, and political campaigns seek donations,  I also seek your help to enable me to continue to host my library and share ideas like this. Visit this page if you want to help me. 

Hey CEO! Take this role!

Today on my Twitter feed I saw a post about "How employers can transform the lives of marginalized young people through mentoring" from the Youth Futures Foundation, based in the UK. I opened the website and looked around and found the recommendations for business leaders that I show below.

The website has a lot of good information about what mentoring is and its value.  It's worth adding to your learning library.  However, what I found really valuable is how it was targeting business leaders and encouraging them to develop strategies that support mentoring.

That's what I've been doing since forming the Tutor/Mentor Connection in Chicago in 1993 and the Tutor/Mentor Institute, LLC in 2011.

I led a volunteer-based tutor/mentor program from 1975 to 2011.  For the first 15 years we were a company sponsored program and I held a full-time retail advertising job.  My constant focus was building student participation, providing meaningful learning activities, and recruiting and retaining volunteers and converting some into leaders who would help me plan and operate the program each year.  When we converted that to a non-profit in 1990, I had to learn how to find the dollars needed to pay for my salary, my staff, and program expenses. That challenge continued through 2011.

It led me to form the Tutor/Mentor Connection in 1993, borrowing ideas from my work in retail advertising at Montgomery Ward and from serving as a Loaned Executive at Chicago's United Way/Crusade of Mercy for four years, as well as the learning and networking I had been doing with other Chicago programs since I first became a volunteer in 1973.  

At Wards, functional teams at the corporate office in Chicago, and at regional offices, supported the operations of over 400 stores, distributed in 40 states.  While each store served customers, the corporate office made sure they had the resources to do that effectively.  They even used millions of dollars in advertising to draw shoppers to EVERY store, not just a few high profile stores.

At the United Way corporate leaders were recruited as Chief Crusaders, who would call on other CEOs to motivate them to build fund raising campaigns and make their own personal pledges.

The strategy the Tutor/Mentor Connection developed in 1993 was to build an information base showing where tutor/mentor programs were most needed, why they were needed, and ways volunteers, donors and businesses could help each program grow.  We added to this a comprehensive list of Chicago area, volunteer-based tutor/mentor programs, and used maps to show where they were located, with overlays showing where they were most needed.

Then we built a year-round communications program intended to draw programs together and attract students, volunteers and donors to each program

Using this any corporate leader could make the commitment shown in the Concept Map below, putting the company name, or CEO name, in the blue box at the top.  

In the middle of the concept map is the 4-part strategy that supports these commitments. It's visualized in this concept map.

Almost every article posted on this blog since I started it in 2005 focuses on this strategy. Our print and email newsletters, started in 1993, do the same. 

Last May I shared a few of my print newsletters in this blog article.  One of those is shown below. It's from 2001 and shows a CEO commitment similar to what is shown on the Youth Futures Foundation website. 

I started sharing those steps in the mid 1990s.  You can now see them in this Role of Leaders PDF. 

In many of my blog articles and PDF essays I use maps to focus attention on supporting youth tutor/mentor programs in every high poverty area of cities like Chicago.

Furthermore, I've created an entire library of concept maps to visualize the information available in my library and the actions needed to reach kids in high poverty areas with long-term mentor-rich programs.

In this article I show a few of those, including the one I show below, which is one of three that make a case for business to build strategic investment in long-term, volunteer-based tutor, mentor and learning programs.

When I saw the link to the Youth Futures Foundation today, one of the first things I did was visit http://www.tutormentorexchange.net to see if I already had it included in my library.  Yes. I added it in 2023.  Thus, while I was reminded of their work again today, the link has been available for over a year to anyone visiting my library for ideas.

While I've piloted the Tutor/Mentor Connection since 1993 in the Chicago region, I've tried to help other communities build similar strategies, in the USA, and around the world.  Below is a map from a Brookings Edu. article that I posted on the Mapping for Justice blog.

This map shows neighborhoods of concentrated poverty in the USA.  Every one of these could benefit from a strategy similar to the Tutor/Mentor Connection.  In fact, if someone were to look at this and say, "I can do that", I'd say, "Use all the information in my website and library, by linking to it."  

You only need to collect information showing where youth programs are needed in your community, and what programs already exist. Then you need to develop a year-round strategy (which you can borrow from what I piloted) to draw people together to learn from the information you're collecting and to draw resources to existing programs or help new ones start where more are needed.

You don't need to start from scratch!

This applies in the UK, South America, Africa, Asia and other places where youth live in areas of concentrated poverty without mentor-rich support systems helping them go to and through school and into adult lives free from poverty's grip.

I'd be happy to guide you through this information.  Just reach out to me on social media, or leave a comment on this blog.

There's over 30 years of information aggregated on my site so I encourage you to enlist university and high school partners, with youth doing research about what's here and why it's important, then sharing that with the "adults in the room" via their own presentations.  This blog shows examples of how that might be done.

Thanks for reading, and (hopefully) sharing!  Sign up for my monthly newsletter - click here. 

I've not drawn a salary since mid 2011 for leading the Tutor/Mentor Institute, LLC and keeping this information available to you and others. Thus, if you're able to help me with a contribution, please visit this page. 

Read my September newsletter

 

I sent my current newsletter out yesterday.  It shares my own experiences from leading a volunteer-based tutor/mentor program for 35 years to help similar programs reach k-12 youth in 2024 and beyond.

Read it at this link. 

Please share the newsletter and the links I point to with leaders in every sector. The strategy I've piloted calls on a shared responsibility for making on-going, mentor-rich programs available to youth in high poverty areas, with volunteers, donors, media and policy makers searching out programs and offering support based on what the program shows on their website, and what the research says about the potential of long-term, relationship-based programs.

Look for me on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, BlueSky and Mastodon.  Find links on this page. 

Share your own blogs, websites, videos and strategies and help me and others learn from you!

Help Fund This Work

At the end of many of my articles I have a request, asking for readers to make contributions to help Fund the work I do to collect and share information that helps kids in high poverty areas connect with volunteers in organized tutor, mentor and learning programs.

Open this link and you'll find the page shown below. 

With your help I can continue.

 If someone you know has become ill and needs money to pay bills, they set up a "Go Fund Me" page and ask for contributions. They are not 501-c-3 non profits. They are people needing help.

The Tutor/Mentor Institute, LLC is not operating as a non profit either. However, it's also not a profit-making business. So, this is my "fund me" page. I (Daniel Bassill) have been self-funding this work since 2011, supported by a small group of continuing donors.

Please add your support.  Send a contribution of $25, $50, $100, $250, $500 or more to help me continue in 2024, 2025 and beyond.

Thank you.