Solving complex problems. Do the homework. Make your own luck.

It's a week before St. Patrick's Day and time to bring out an image I created a few years ago and repeat each year at this time. Here's the article I wrote last March. Please take time to read it.

View cMap version

There are several elements in this graphic that I want to highlight.

First is this "Mentoring Kids to Careers" graphic that I've used since the late 1990s to show that kids in high poverty areas need support from pre-school through employment..which is a 16 to 20 year journey.  Few leaders and/or donors are able to sustain a commitment for this many years.

Yet, to various degrees of success, we do maintain an on-going commitment to public schools, faith groups, colleges, hospitals and other place based institutions.

Why not to mentor-rich non-school youth serving programs?

In both of the above graphics I include maps of Chicago, where high poverty areas are highlighted. At the left you can see me pointing to newspaper stories about violence, gangs, poorly performing schools, and to maps that show where these problems are most concentrated. 

Well organized, mentor-rich non-school programs are needed in all of these areas and I've been trying to teach this to anyone I could reach since starting the Tutor/Mentor Connection (T/MC) in 1993 and the Tutor/Mentor Institute, LLC in 2011.

Finally, I embed the four steps of the problem solving strategy the T/MC has followed since 1993 into the four leaves of the clover graphic.  I describe these four steps in many articles on this blog, such as this one.

The goal?  Better information, with more people looking at it, and understanding it, can lead to a more consistent flow of needed resources to every existing tutor/mentor program in Chicago (or any other city that adopts this strategy) and can lead to new programs being formed in places on the map where they are needed.

Building the information base and an on-going communications and learning strategy is what I've been piloting and attempting to do since 1993.  I've had a lot of bad luck over the years as a result of business conditions, the environment, wars, terrorism, and leadership changes. Yet I've also been lucky from time to time to have someone step forward with a  major cash contribution to help me do this work, such as in 2007 when an anonymous donor gave $50,000 which we used to rebuild our in-house mapping and develop the on-line Chicago Tutor/Mentor Program locator platform. Or to have volunteers step forward an offer to help build or update a web site for me.

If you want to help me keep doing this work, visit this page and make a contribution.

If  you want to adopt the Tutor/Mentor Connection and re-build it in Chicago or apply it to your own city, introduce yourself with a comment or on my Twitter, Linkedin or Facebook pages.