Follow up from Tutor/Mentor Conference

I've been sending the following message to volunteers who hosted workshops last Friday at the Tutor/Mentor Leadership and Networking Conference in Chicago.

Thank you again for presenting a workshop last Friday at the Tutor/Mentor Leadership and Networking Conference and for helping me promote the event. About 85 people participated from 45 different organizations. Since 1994 when we launched the conferences more than 1,000 different organizations have been represented.

At http://femioutreach.blogspot.com/2011/11/tutor-mentor-conference.html you can see how one participant has written about her experience at the conference. The photo above is of me and Tramaine Montel Ford, who was a keynote speaker at the conference. Tramaine and I have been connected since the mid 1990s when he was a student at the Cabrini Connections program.

If we can encourage this type of blogging and information-sharing from every participant we can attract more attention to the challenges and opportunities of tutoring/mentoring and do more to build the resources needed for programs to constantly innovate ways to improve.

Attached are the evaluations that were turned in for your workshop. (each presenter was sent PDF copies of their evaluations). Each speaker was also encouraged to join in the online forum at http://tutormentorconnection.ning.com and http://debategraph.org/mentoring_kids_to_careers with the goal that we connect to each other and many other people in more depth during the months between conferences and that this motivates more people to come together every six months when we do host future conferences.

I’ll be sending out a conference survey via email to gather feedback. I hope you’ll take a few minutes to respond.

There is much to do and not enough time and money to do it all. I hope you’ll continue to support this effort.

While we connected a small group of people last week this group can become an army for making good things happen if we can connect in on-line communities and add others to this effort.

Dan Bassill
Tutor/Mentor Connection
Tutor/Mentor Institute, LLC