Go beyond marches to stop violence

In yesterday's Chicago Tribune I saw an article about the Mayor of Chicago taking part in an anti violence march in the Woodlawn neighborhood of Chicago. One person was quoted as saying "They need to spend some resources to open a youth center here, give kids someplace safe to go."



This is a map of the Woodlawn area created about a year ago. I included it in this article. It was built using the interactive Tutor/Mentor Program Locator.

My purpose in sharing this is to encourage business, faith and community leaders to use the Tutor/Mentor Connection maps and ideas in their own planning. Invite us to your meetings.

This section on Collaboration illustrates our goal of helping every high poverty neighborhood have a variety of volunteer-based tutor/mentor programs, supported by the people who do business in the area, or who drive through the area as they go in an out of the city.

School starts in a few weeks. Tutor/mentor programs are looking for volunteers, and dollars, to provide their services. It's up to the Mayor, and other leaders, to use their visibility, and these marches, to draw needed resources to all of the programs that need help to continue services in 2010-11, and to all of the neighborhoods where new programs are needed.