Use Maps in Planing. Think Long Term.

It's a new week, meaning new opportunities to influence the thinking of people who are concerned with the economy, inequality, poverty and democracy in America.  Below are two sets of images I hope will stimulate your thinking.

Maps/Indicators

Browse various articles on this blog, and the MappingforJustice blog and you'll see maps used over and over to focus attention on all of the areas of Chicago where a wide range of support is needed to help youth born today be starting jobs/careers in their mid-twenties.   There are many on-line mapping platforms that people can draw from to create their own map-stories and strategies. 

It takes a long time

View the strategy presentations in my web library and the articles that focus on leadership, planning and network building.  

For instance if you read this article, you'll find a copy of a 1993 Chicago SunTimes article talking about poverty, saying,  "Chicago neighborhoods that were poor 20 years ago are even more entrenched in poverty today because the city lacks a comprehensive battle plan". 

If you browse some of the articles I've posted over the past few weeks you can see how I encourage others to look at the stories I write, then rewrite them in their own blog articles.

I'm not an elected leader, celebrity, CEO or rich person. I'm just someone who got involved 40 years ago mentoring a 4th grade boy from Cabrini-Green and has stayed involved every year since then. As I became leader of a single program in 1975 I had to start every year thinking "how do I make this work?"  Rather than just drawing from my own small pool of experience, I began to reach out to borrow ideas from others. As I did that, I began building a list of who I was learning from, which became the library of links that I have hosted on-line since 1998.

I started communicating strategy ideas in printed newsletters in the 1980s and through the Tutor/Mentor Connection, between 1993 and 2001. I started this blog in 2005. 

I point to other people's blog articles in this section of the web library. I point to other people's ideas for collaboration, innovation, knowledge management, etc. in this section.  I point to challenges facing non profits in this section. 

It takes time to dive through all of this information. It should. It takes four to six years to go through college. As the news stories I point to indicate, it will take decades of consistent effort to move America to a better place than it is today.

We need to find ways to inspire leadership at many levels to keep this movement alive for that long.

Thus,  I'd like to be pointing to hundreds of blogs and web sites which post articles, visualizations and maps, similar to mine (or borrowed from mine) showing their own strategies, maps, and web libraries, and pointing out how long we need to stay involved in order to maximize our impact.

If you're writing these, post your link in the comment section..