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.