Interns help share strategies through visualizations

This graphic is one of many you can see on the Tutor/Mentor Intern blog. It was created by one of two new winter 2014 interns from South Korea and IIT in Chicago. On this page you can view introductions of other interns from past years, and on this page you can see projects they have done to help communicate the strategies and ideas that have been created over the past 20 years by Tutor/Mentor Connection and Tutor/Mentor Institute, LLC.

One goal of the Tutor/Mentor Institute, LLC has been to build partnership with universities, high schools and other programs, which unleash students as researchers, leaders, network builders, etc. who duplicate what Tutor/Mentor Connection has been doing since 1993, but focus their effort on their own community and/or neighborhood. If you'd like to get involved just introduce yourself.

In the Four Part Strategy visualized with this graphic, and described in this presentation, we show that aggregated information can be used by many people to support innovations that lead to more and better programs helping youth move through school and into jobs and careers. There are millions of people adding knowledge to the internet everyday, from formal research, information sharing by different organizations, and opinion pieces in blogs, newspapers, etc.

Once this information is released is has a short lifespan, then becomes archived were few people will ever read it. The second and third steps of the Tutor/Mentor Institute strategy involve a) creating greater daily advertising and public education efforts, intended to increase the number of people who look at this archived information; and b) building facilitation teams in thousands of locations, where people who are building their own understanding of all of this information, lead learning groups that help others to build their understand, too.

In this post on the Tutor/Mentor Connection forum, one volunteer wrote, "This forum is essentially modelled on a similar format as Google's. The "In-Forming" Process works something like this:

1. Uninformed people interact with information and become informed.

2. Informed people interact with uninformed people, producing more informed people.

3. Informed people interact with each other.

4. To the point where new information is being passed along to all parties involved, starting the process over again."

The dollars and manpower to create a reach and frequency of daily advertising that would draw millions of people to this information does not exist. Nor do dollars exist for hiring a network of trainers and facilitators. However, just as volunteers in faith groups lead weekly discussions of scripture, student volunteers and interns from thousands of locations could be doing what the interns with Tutor/Mentor Institute, LLC are doing, to increase the number of people becoming interested, and helping them become informed, so more people are becoming consistent and strategic in how they help k-12 youth mentoring and tutoring programs become more available to youth in all places where they are needed.