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 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 pdf which focuses on good planning.



This page 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.