Unleashing Influence of Business School Students

On LinkedIn I'm following a series of posts by Brad Fulton, of Indiana University, showing how they are "Building a comprehensive data analytics platform that integrates information from millions of tax filings, grants and other sources related to philanthropic giving."

I introduced his work and provided links in this article about "Making Philanthropy Work Better".

More recently I've been following LinkedIn posts by Daniel Max Crowley of Penn State University, such as the one I show below. 

Dr. Crowley is challenging universities to rethink how they use their research to increase public impact.  I  introduced Dr. Fulton to Dr. Crowley this week, since getting more people to find and use the philanthropy research, can be part of the strategies Dr. Crowley advocates for.

This is something I've tried to influence for more than 25 years.  Find the graphic shown below in this article, titled "Leaders Needed to Solve Complex Problems". 

In that article I called on more strategic involvement from universities and shared a student-involvement strategy that I began framing in the late 1990s.  In 2006 a Net Impact Fellow from the University of Chicago formalized it in a wiki article titled "Business School Connection".

Here's a paragraph summarizing the goal.

The Business School Connection is an concept strategy created by the Tutor Mentor Connection in the mid 1990s. Its goal is to create a link between business schools and tutor mentor organizations around the nation where business schools and their students use the skills they are learning in an on-going effort to increase visibility and raise operating dollars and volunteers to support volunteer-based tutor/mentor programs in the city where a business school is located, and in other parts of the country. The T/MC believes that MBA students have unique ways of thinking and valuable connections that can be used to channel monetary and in-kind resources to tutor mentor organizations.

Below is a graphic showing the year-round public awareness and network-building strategy that I began in 1993 and still follow in 2026.  

Imagine what might happen if students from business schools, marketing and communications classes and journalism schools were running campaigns every year that use data like what Brad Fulton is collecting, to draw attention and resources to every high poverty zip code in the country. Imagine this being a competition between high profile universities, to see who does it better.

If the work done in one year, by one team of students, is saved on a website at the university, all teams could learn from what was done in the past in an on-going effort to do better in the future.  Sharing this resource across many universities would accelerate the innovations and the impact of this program on the well-being of the community surrounding the university.

Imagine the slices of the leadership pie in the upper left side of this graphic being different business schools, who each focus on building more support for youth-serving programs in their communities. See it in this article. 

Last fall and this spring students from an Information Visualization MOOC at Indiana University created dashboards to show participation in the 1994 to 2015 May and November Tutor/Mentor Leadership and Networking Conferences that I hosted in Chicago.  This was a follow up to earlier work done in 2014. They showed how data can be collected from registration forms and/or surveys then uploaded into visualization tools like Kumu.io, Gephi and Tableau.  Below is one example.

You can read about the IVMOOC work in articles found here and here.

Now imagine a team of students using the tools the IVMOOC teams have created to identify all of the departments within a university ecosystem that focus on a common issue, which could be very narrow, like tutoring, or much broader, like education and youth development.

Connecting those already doing this work is a step toward identifying those who are not yet involved.  I suspect not many business schools would show up on the first round of surveys if the goal was to find programs aimed at expanding the networks of kids living in areas of concentrated poverty.

Last month this blog recorded 519,578 page views.  That's a huge increase over previous months. I'm not sure what is driving this, but I hope it continues and that it leads to people from more places looking at the ideas I'm sharing.  Maybe one will be someone like Mackenzie Scott, who's looking for new ways to make a lasting impact with their wealth.  

Funding a Tutor/Mentor Connection with Business School Connection at one or more universities would be a great investment.

Thanks for reading.  Connect with me on LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, BlueSky and/or Mastodon.  See links on this page.

I depend on contributions from a small group of supporters to fund the work I'm doing.  Visit this page if you'd like to help.

Traffic up on this blog and Tutor/Mentor website

I've been writing this blog since April 2005 and look monthly at the "stats".  Below is the report through June 3, 2026.  Look at how many people visited the site in May.... 518,578!  That's the largest single month ever!

Then visit the home page of www.tutormentorexchange.net and look at the "Who's Online since 7-7-25" box in the upper right side of the home page.

That shows 2,580,506 guests since July 7, 2025.  This has averaged around 250,000 visits a month since last July when the feature was added to the website.

I don't get a lot of comments on the blog so don't know who, or how many, are using the ideas to help volunteer-based tutor, mentor and learning programs grow in the Chicago region or in other cities and states.  I don't know what sparked the huge increase of visits in May 2026.  

I even recorded a large number of views of my visual essays on Scribd.com last month.  Over 15,000!

Below is a graphic that I've used for many years.  The big circle represents all the information that I host on my website and share in my blog articles. The map of Chicago emphasizes my goal of helping long-term volunteer-based tutor/mentor programs reach k-12 youth in every high poverty neighborhood.

The YOU represents anyone who looks at the information I'm sharing, then shares it with their own network.  That can be as simple as just reposting an article.  It can be more sophisticated, by how someone creates their own version of an article or visual essay, then shares it on their own social media platforms.  

As more people take this role, it leads more people to information they can use to build and sustain programs that help K-12 kids through school and into jobs and careers, free of the challenges facing those who live in areas of concentrated poverty.

I'll turn 80 this December. I hope. My lung doctor told me this week that my lung disease is not getting better and that I should be planning for end-of-life activities.  He did not say this was "imminent". But, it was part of the conversation. 

That just means it is more important than ever that a donor steps forward to provide funds that motivate a university to create an on-campus Tutor/Mentor Connection, with my archives, websites, blogs, etc. hosted by them and their students/alumni.  Here's one article where I've extended that invitation. 

If you are the YOU in the graphic shown above, who can you share this with who has the money/influence to motivate one, or many, universities to create an on-campus Tutor/Mentor Connection?  

I don't know how many years I have left.  Even without a progressive lung disease, none of us really knows when our time has ended.  In the meantime, I'll keep posting and keep looking for a way to preserve my 50 year history so others can learn from it after I'm gone.

Please share my posts and connect with me on LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, BlueSky, Twitter and/or Mastodon.

And, if you're able, please visit this page and make a contribution to help me pay the bills while I'm still here!

Thank you!   

Honor their sacrifices. Keep fighting.

Monday is Memorial Day.  I've posted articles like these, almost every year since starting this blog in 2005. They all have a similar message.  "Honor the sacrifices of those who served by giving your time, talent, dollars and votes to create systems of hope and opportunity for youth living in areas of highly concentrated poverty."

In 2013 Kyungryul Kim, an intern from South Korea, created this video, showing steps needed to fight this war.  It was based on a blog article I wrote earlier.

 

I point to more than 150 Chicago area youth-serving programs in lists I have built since the early 1990s. My goal has been to help each program attract more consistent attention and a better flow of needed operating resources.   

The "War on Poverty" video highlights each of the steps shown on this graphic.

Every city and state needs a planning process like this. I don't think I've ever seen one from any Mayor of Chicago.  That's one reason we're still fighting this war.  If leaders in your community have created a visual like this to show their process, please share it.

I follow most of Chicago's volunteer-based tutor, mentor and learning organizations on their social media channels, such as LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram.  Very few post on BlueSky, Threads or Mastodon.  I don't use Tic Toc, so don't know how frequently Chicago youth-serving programs are posting there.

That means I'm able to see posts by leaders of many different tutor/mentor programs.  Many are eloquent in making the case for why volunteer-based tutor/mentor programs are needed.   

A couple of weeks ago Jeffrey Beckham, Jr,. CEO of Chicago Scholars, wrote this article, titled "The Power of Mirrors and Windows".   In it he wrote, 

"Someone else asked me recently, how do you not burn out doing this work? 

 The answer is the young people. They keep you honest. 

 Every single scholar I meet reminds me why it matters. You don’t burn out when you stay close to the people you are doing it for. You burn out when you get too far away from them, and it starts feeling like strategy instead of people."

I feel the same way.

My passion for the Tutor/Mentor Connection, which I've led since 2011 through Tutor/Mentor Institute, LLC, comes from my interactions with students and volunteers of the Montgomery Ward-Cabrini Green Tutoring Program, which I led from 1975 to 1992 and Cabrini Connections, which I formed in late 1992 and led until mid 2011.  

Read Jeffrey's article, and follow the posts by other tutor, mentor and learning programs.  As we honor those who gave the ultimate sacrifice to preserve our country's freedom, these show that the war is not over.  There's much you can do to help youth and families living in areas of concentrated poverty.

There's much you can do to stop the damage being done to the United States of America by the current President and his supporters.  

One thing you can do is keep reading my blog articles, then share your interpretations of them with your own network, the way Kyungryul Kim did in 2013.

Many voices will be needed, for many years.

Have a safe holiday.  

I depend on contributions from a small group of donors to keep doing this work. If you can help, visit this page. 

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. 

Are your conferences part of a larger strategy?

Over the past few months I've posted articles showing analytics dashboards created by students in an Information Visualization MOOC (IVMOOC) at Indiana University.  These looked at the Tutor/Mentor Leadership and Networking Conferences that I hosted in Chicago every six months from May 1994 to May 2015.  Skim through these articles to find stories I've posted. 

Under the heading of "Mapping & Analyzing Participation" the 2026 team wrote:

 "Who shows up to build a community? Which organizations sustain engagement over years, and which sectors are consistently absent? This platform answers those questions using 6410 attendance records from 42 Tutor/Mentor Leadership and Networking Conferences hosted by Daniel F. Bassill between 1994 and 2015. Raw attendance sheets are transformed through a documented pipeline — normalization, network construction, and visualization — so findings can be reproduced, extended, and applied to future events. The methodology is explicit at every stage."

Dozens of big and small conferences and gatherings are held in the USA and the world every month.  I wonder how many use their events as part of an ongoing effort to solve a specific problem.

Below is a concept map that I created many years ago to show the "Knowledge Based Problem Solving Strategy" that I've piloted since forming the Tutor/Mentor Connection in Chicago in 1993.

I described what this map was sharing in this article.  

I've been collecting and sharing information that anyone could use to fill high poverty neighborhoods of Chicago and other places with on-going, volunteer-based, tutor, mentor and learning programs that reach K-12 youth and help them through school and into adult lives.  

If you look at the vertical lines on this graphic, it shows formal and informal learning that needs take place in many places on an on-going basis.  Across the top of the map I show year-round actions intended to draw people to the information, and to each other.  I've circled the Tutor/Mentor Conference to indicate that it was part of that strategy.  You can view the conference goals on this page.

The dashboards created by the #IVMOOC teams enable you to explore the data.  They show that while I was successful at drawing Chicago area programs, and a growing number from other states, to the conferences, I was not successful in drawing other parts of the ecosystem (such as business, philanthropy, media, hospitals, etc). 

Below are just two examples of how I zoomed into the maps on the dashboard to learn who attended the conferences and how often they attended.

The dashboard that I point to for the Spring 2026 team shows work that still needs to be completed to make it more accurate and easier-to-use.  I hope I'll be part of a Fall 2026 team and that some of this is also updated this summer. I'll post updates as I receive them.

I wish I had this resource in the late 2000s to show donors the value of what I was doing. I'm not sure that would have changed what happened as a result of the 2008-10 financial crisis in the USA.  

But that's not the point.

These articles are intended to show anyone who organizes a conference how they can use these tools to build on-going participation of a wider network of people, leading to greater success in achieving their overall goals.

The Fall 2025 team and the Spring 2026 teams both provided resources that others can use to collect participation data and turn it into visualizations using Kumu, Gephi and/or Tableau. I share links to these on this page. They are FREE. 

Follow and connect with me on LinkedIn, BlueSky, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Mastodon and you'll see many updates about these tools, as well as how I'm encouraging others to use them.  I'd love to see posts from Chicago area tutor/mentor programs that show how often their organization was part of the conferences.

Thanks for reading, and "hopefully", sharing my posts.  

I depend on a small group of donors to help me keep paying the bills. If you'd like to help, visit this page. 

Mapping & Analyzing Participation - Spring 2026 IVMOOC

Over the past few months I've shared work done in Fall 2025 by a team of #IVMOOC (Information Visualization) students from Indiana University. They are using history of the Tutor/Mentor Leadership and Networking Conferences that I hosted in Chicago from May 1994 to May 2015 to build tools that anyone can use to understand engagement in events they organize and/or networks they have been building.   

In this post I'm introducing work done by the Spring 2026 IVMOOC team.

Below is the home page of the dashboard they developed.

Under the heading of "Mapping & Analyzing Participation" they wrote:  "Who shows up to build a community? Which organizations sustain engagement over years, and which sectors are consistently absent? This platform answers those questions using 6410 attendance records from 42 Tutor/Mentor Leadership and Networking Conferences hosted by Daniel F. Bassill between 1994 and 2015.

Raw attendance sheets are transformed through a documented pipeline — normalization, network construction, and visualization — so findings can be reproduced, extended, and applied to future events. The methodology is explicit at every stage."

You can explore this at this link. 

Across the top of the page are tabs for "Methodology, Dashboard, Search, Network Maps, More".  

On the Methodology page they wrote: "This project documents a reproducible pipeline for transforming raw conference attendance records into analyzable social network data. Each of the four stages below is codified — the inputs, transformations, and outputs are explicit so the process can be repeated, extended, or adapted for future events."

The Analytics Dashboard is where you can explore the conference data.  I show two views from my own searching. The first looks at 1996 conference participation.  

The Fall 2025 data analysis did not organize the data by category, such as program, college, intermediary, etc.  The 2026 team has created 11 categories.  Thus you can explore by year and by category to better understand where there was strong participation and where it was weak.  The "blue" color represents people associated with volunteer-based tutor/mentor programs based in Chicago and other states. These were the majority at each conference.

The Network Maps page has three visualizations created using the data. Below I show a view created using Map 2 on the page.  

I entered "Lawyers" in the search bar at the upper left, and got a view showing the Lawyers Lend A Hand to Youth Program. When I hovered my cursor over their icon, I received a view showing other organizations who attended the same conferences.

At the bottom of the map are the categories you can search to learn more about participation.  Below is a view that I created by selecting the "college" category, then highlighting DePaul University.

If I had this tool when I was hosting the conferences I could have collected data on what workshops people attended, then mapped this to show more ways people connected with each other.

The "More" button at the far right in the top menu has four sections.  One shows "previous iterations". 

This says, "Before this platform, a student team (Team K) built NetworkMap: a web application for collecting participant data at live events and converting it into network-ready exports. That work established the core problem statement — how do you get from a conference sign-in sheet to a social network graph? — and demonstrated one viable answer. This platform picks up where it left off, extending the pipeline toward rigorous analysis and reproducible visualization."

The Kumu.io visualization created by the Fall 2025 team enabled you to search by year, then look at participation in the two conferences held that year. An example is shown at the left. 

The Spring 2026 team enabled a search by organization, and by category. I showed a couple of examples above.
 
This is what I've hoped for in the past as interns have worked with me.  By having new students learn from past work, they can build improvements into the analysis.   On-going iterations of the work create high quality data and educate more people to use the resource in their own networking efforts.  It's been my goal when I've posted articles like "Reaching out to Universities."

Another page under the "more" tab is the "Project Roadmap". 

This is a detailed review of what work has been done and what work still needs to be done by future IVMOOC teams.  In the "Data Cleaning" column is a recognition that work still needs to be done to clean the data so that organizations who registered under different spelling and/or grammar, don't show on the charts as different orgs. 

For instance, if you use the Organization Search page you can enter the name of your organization and see if it participated in one, or many, conferences.  I searched for "lawyers" and the "Lawyers Lend A Hand to Youth Program" showed up 18 times!  

Mapping & Analyzing Participation - Spring 2026 IVMOOC presentation.  Since this is a formal class project, the team was graded based on the presentation they created, which was shared via a ZOOM call last Monday.

Open this page and view the IVMOOC presentation.  Page 2 is shown below.

This says, "What Problem are We Solving?

 20+ years of conference attendance data exists but has never been fully analyzed in terms of reproducibility No system exists to visualize who participated, how often, or across which sectors. The data is the evidence base for Daniel's network-building work ." 

There is a LOT of information here.  Thank you to the students from Indiana University who worked on  it.  I hope many will take a look and then apply the ideas to their own work.

I have created a "Mapping Event Participation" page on the Tutor/Mentor Institute, LLC website.  Visitors can use this to learn about the work done by IVMOOC teams and to find resources they can use to apply this process to their own event management.

What's next.  I'll update this blog as I receive updated materials from the IVMOOC team.  Hopefully I'll be part of the Fall 2026 IVMOOC, or the one after that. There's still plenty of work to do.

Since 1993 interns helped me grow the site-based Cabrini Connections program and the Tutor/Mentor Connection.  In 2006 I asked Michael Tam, and intern from Hong Kong to create a blog to share what he was learning.  You can read his posts starting here.

I've used his blog since 2006 to show work done by other interns since then. My most recent post's headline is "Tipping Point - Role of Universities". 

The work being done by IVMOOC teams illustrates my goal of motivating people to spend time reviewing my blog and websites, reflecting on the work being done, then creating their own interpretations.  This expands the number of people thinking more deeply about ways to help youth and families living in areas of concentrated, segregated poverty and the role of organized, on-going, volunteer-based tutor, mentor and learning programs.  

Thus, as you look at the work done by the IVMOOC teams, think of ways you can help others build this event analysis process into their on-going efforts.  And think of ways students from many universities can be helping.  If you have the means, consider making a major gift to your local university to create an on-campus Tutor/Mentor Connection, where there is a multi-decade stream of students looking at this work and building on what was done in previous years.    

I encourage you to connect with me on LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, BlueSky, Twitter and/or Mastodon.  (see links here).

And, if you are able, please visit this page and make a contribution to help me pay the bills.

Study Guide - Tutor/Mentor on Substack.com

When I became the volunteer leader of the Montgomery Ward/Cabrini-Green Tutoring Program in 1975 I was holding a full-time retail advertising job with the company. The program started that year with 100 pairs of 2nd-6th grade kids and workplace volunteers.

There was no way I could personally train every volunteer, so I tried to create a "learning" organization by providing information they could use via our monthly newsletters and weekly handouts.

I continued that practice through email newsletters, blogs, a website and social media through 2011 when I stopped leading a single program. I've continued that practice through the Tutor/Mentor Connection (1993-present) and Tutor/Mentor Institute, LLC (2011-present) in an effort to build more consistent support to help volunteer-based tutor/mentor programs reach K-12 kids in every high poverty area of the Chicago region and beyond.

I've posted articles on this blog since 2005 and on the MappingforJustice blog since 2011 (it was started by Mike Trakan in 2008). I've posted on the Intern blog since it was started by an intern from Hong Kong in 2006.

They are represent a curriculum of ideas that could be embedded in any leadership training program.

Since last fall I've posted a series of articles on Substack.com that aim to highlight featured ideas. Below you can see images for these posts.

You can find links to each of these at https://substack.com/@danielbassill319958

Open this 1984-85 Montgomery Ward/Cabrini-Green Tutoring Program archive and you'll find copies of several newsletters like the one I shared at the top of this article. 

While the maps and much of the research points to Chicago where there are thousands of kids living in highly segregated high-poverty areas, the ideas and strategies can be applied in any city in the world.  I invite you to view them, and created your own versions, putting your own maps and ideas into them.

Then connect with me on LinkedIn, BlueSky, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and other platforms and help build awareness and involvement with these ideas, and with youth-serving programs in more places. Find links on this page.

Thanks for reading.  I depend on a few long-time supporters for small donations that help me continue this work.  Visit this page if you'd like to help.