Mayor Emanuel's Mentoring Initiative - Not Enough

A friend of mine sent me an email today with this link to the City of Chicago page announcing Mayor Emanuel's Mentoring Initiative and asked me what I think of it.

My friend asked, 

Does your mapping tell you anything based on communities/organizations identified in the attached announcement?

I'm interested in looking at your maps to see the relationships between mentoring programs and public safety, since Rahm's effort is based on University of Chicago's Becoming A Man research. Robert Sampson's work which is the foundation for this research argues CBOs density and community leaders collaboration impacts community outcomes like public safety, education obtainment, health, economic development, etc. My questions include:
A) Which Chicago communities have higher tutoring programs density?
B) How do tutoring programs collaborate with other CBOs? On public safety?"

Here's what I sent as a response:

I encourage you to read this set of articles on my blog, which I've been writing since 2005. They show what I wish the Mayor were doing.

As to questions A and B, I've not had resources to update my surveys and maps they way they need to be updated since 2011, thus any answer I offer would be based on old information. Below are three maps made using my resources.

Furthermore, there is not a simple answer to this because while the map can show fewer programs in the South Side poverty neighborhoods, and too few in Austin and other areas with large numbers of poor kids, unless you break this down by type of program, age group served, history and number of kids involved, the answer is too superficial.

I encourage you to set aside some time to view this Dave Snowden video about how not to manage complexity. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gaFQJaQTXhY

In one early statement, he says, "We have to see the system as a whole".  

Then look at this Mission/Strategy page of the Get In Chicago neighborhood, which is one of the strategies that the Mayor is focusing on.

The map only points to a few of the high needs neighborhoods, and the Get In Chicago strategy only focuses on kids at the top of the needs pyramid.  I created the set of maps below in 2013 to illustrate this.

The Mayor needs to have a map of the entire city, and perhaps even the suburbs, on his web site, and needs to be drawing people from business, religion, education, media and other sectors together using the very latest on-line tools, around one question, which I visualize in this strategy map.

"What are all the things we need to be doing to assure that every child born in a poverty neighborhood (and elsewhere) is starting a job/career by his/her mid 20's?  If he's doing that it's not transparent on any web sites that I've seen.

The Mayor needs to be leading a learning strategy, with people clicking in all the nodes on this map, digging deeper into the ideas, strategies and resources that need to be included in a master plan. (click here to view Master Plan that I outlined in 1998 and never was able to find significant, or consistent, support for.)

While the goals of my strategy map are visualized on the Thrive Chicago site, a strategy and on-going process that engages a growing number of people and organizations, and supports program growth in all poverty neighborhoods, is not shown.

However, this group is slowed by it's effort to create measures of progress and impact and after 3 years still does not have a map and a marketing strategy with a goal of helping organizations working with youth get the ideas, talent, technology and dollars each needs to build great organizations able to sustain long-term, constantly improving programs aimed at the mission stated on their About-us page.

I offered ideas about Thrive Chicago in this 2013 article, including the graphic above.   I've posted 229 strategy articles on this blog since 2005.  I've posted 413 leadership articles. I've posted 201 articles showing ways maps could be used and devoted the entire MappingforJustice blog, started in 2008, to this strategy.

I started sharing these ideas in printed newsletters sent to the Mayor, foundation leaders, business leaders and tutor/mentor program leaders in 1994.

While I would love to have someone provide financial compensation for me to do this work, especially over the past five years, the ideas I've shared are FREE and available to anyone who wants to take the time to read them.

Mayor Emanuel and his team could have borrowed this from me in 2011. Mayor Daley could have been using the ideas since 1994.

President Obama, who was a speaker at the spring 1999 Tutor/Mentor Leadership and Networking Conference, has had close to 20 years to use these ideas. I presented them to Michelle Obama in the mid 1990s when she was at the University of Chicago.

In the past four years I've been posting articles about MOOCs and the Connected Learning MOOC, because of the way the connect educators from around the country in on-going learning and idea sharing. The give every participant a voice and opportunity to share their own ideas.

This is another effort the Mayor could be including in a "big picture" strategy.

I've only touched on a few of the elements that need to be considered in a "big picture" strategy. This tagcloud represents the tags on the left side of this blog, which each reflect on part of what we need to be drawing from as we develop day-to-day actions that Snowden refers to in his TED talk.

The four-part strategy visualized in this concept map another guide that could be used.  You'll find it referred to often in my articles.

If the Mayor and other leaders are using these ideas I don't know. 

I've not been invited into any conversations and certainly have not been offered any consulting roles.