Stay Focused. Do What You Can Every Day.

This morning I listened on-line to the State of the Community presentation, delivered by leaders of The Chicago Community Trust, at a large gathering in Chicago.  The Twitter hash tag is #WhatYouDoMatters.

Last night as I ate dinner I listened to Mayor Rahm Emanuel on public radio, and followed the #Rahmtalk on Twitter.   I hope someone creates a Storyfy archive of each of these, and that you'll see how I share ideas from this blog and my archive in each.

A year ago I wrote an article titled, "Keeping Focus Amid a World on Fire"  Little did I know how much the world would change in just one year, and by the votes of nearly 50 million fellow Americans.

I've used this graphic a few times in the past, such as here,  to illustrate how I've been sharing strategy ideas for nearly 20 years, while others with greater visibility, more reputation, and more money, keep coming into this space with new invitations of joining together, connecting ideas and networks, etc.

I just keep repeating the same ideas over and over. 

Below I'm going to post a few graphics, with links to blog articles where they appeared. I hope you or others will take a look.

 After the Election, Work to Do.  I actually wrote this on November 5th, before the election.  Now that we know who will be in the White House for the next few years, it's more important than ever that many people share ownership of this graphic and take a role in helping youth living in high poverty, urban, rural or reservation, have school and non-school support systems that help them move from first grade to a job and career over the next 12 to 20 years.

This commitment has to be continuous over the cycles of many elected leaders.

Birth to Work Blueprints Needed.  I've included these graphics in many articles since I started writing this in 2005.  People who build hotels, homes, skycrapers, etc. follow a blueprint, showing work to be done from foundation to top floor.  Each page of the blueprint shows work that needs to be done by different contractors. They all need to be skilled and they all need to be paid.

We need such blueprints for solving any of the complex problems we face, and we need to find ways to generate revenue so skilled people are doing that work.   

I've created a library of concept maps that could be used by leaders in Chicago and other cities to build a comprehensive set of blueprints that show people where and how to get involved, and show a sequence of supports that need to be available in every high poverty neighborhood or zip code in the country.

I created these graphics in the 1990s and  have shared them consistently via printed newsletters, web  sites and blog articles like this one. The headline was "Cubs Win! Let's talk about building great youth support teams."

The challenge is that people are busy, foundations want new ideas, and funding generally only covers a small percent of anyone's work. 

That leads to service-learning and creating a meaningful role for involving young people.

I included this graphic in a 2015 blog article created and shared with a network of educator who were joined together via a Connected Learning cMOOC, using the hashtag of #clmooc.

I pointed to two visualizations created by interns from South Korea. In these they reviewed work done by previous interns, in an effort to draw new attention to work done in the past. You can see the visualizations here.

Today I've shown you just a few of more than 1000 articles I've posted on this blog since 2005.  You can find other articles, showing uses of GIS maps, on the MappingforJustice blog.

I created this tag cloud a few months ago, to show the different categories of articles on this blog, and to encourage people to dig into these articles and use the ideas to build and sustain systems of support for youth and adults living in high poverty neighborhoods of Chicago and other cities.

While I don't have any financial support from local or national foundations and few people helping me do this work, I think it's important and will continue to share the ideas, regardless of what disasters are demanding that I focus on other issues.

If you're using these ideas, or creating versions of  your own, please post a comment and introduce yourself and your blog or web site. Together we can do more than we can working alone.