Reaching out to Universities

Here's a graphic that I created a few months ago in preparation for a meeting with some students and faculty at DePaul University in Chicago.

From top to bottom it illustrates a vision of creating youth serving organizations that help urban youth move more safely and successfully through school and into jobs and careers. It compares the planning to that involved in building tall sky-scrapers, where many talents are needed, much financing is needed, and where you work from the foundation to the top floor over a period of years.

The map in the middle illustrates that there are colleges and universities in different parts of Chicago (or other cities) who are full of student, faculty and alumni talent, and serve as anchor organizations able to support the growth of long-term tutor/mentor programs in the area surrounding their universities.

The last two graphics illustrate that while it takes daily effort by many people to build and sustain one, or many, youth serving organizations, this is just one issue that people are concerned with on a daily basis.,

Thus, part of the role of student teams on  universities is to mobilize leaders who will focus their talent and resources on the youth development slide of the pie, while also connecting, sharing and drawing ideas from groups working on other problems, in other places.

Universities are critically important in this process because as we move through 2016 and into future years, there still is no body of knowledge that everyone draws from to build and sustain youth serving programs in high poverty areas that last for 10-30 years and show on their web sites the impact they have had over that many years.  Imagine if there were no thousand year history supporting architecture, engineering and the building trades, but that anyone who wanted to build a building, first had to figure out what talent was needed, and had to build training programs so the talent had the skills needed to build the building. Imagine them doing this while also trying to find the funding needed to develop the talent, and spread it to all the places where tutor/mentor "buildings" were needed.

I've created a huge library of ideas and information, with links to over 2000 other web sites, who each link to many thousand of additional web sites.  Working through this information will take years of study. Universities could make this a degree-earning process and provide manpower to support organization growth at the same time. Below is a presentation that outlines my goal. If you're connected to a university, or looking to put your name on a building at your alma mater, I hope you'll make this your mission.

Forming a College-Based Tutor/Mentor Connection by Daniel F. Bassill

I've written more than 1000 articles on this blog since 2005, and tagged most of them so you can view multiple articles focused on a similar idea. The tags are listed on the left side of this article. Below that are links to other web sites that contain additional information and resources.

Enjoy your reading. I'll look forward to hearing from you.