New Research on Mentoring Shows Funding Challenges

This week I received a new report from MENTOR, titled "Opportunities to Invest in Long-Term Social Capital for Our Youth: A Philanthropic Agenda."  You can download the report from this page. 

Below is a passage from the report's introduction:

I highlighted the part that said "A striking data point from the study's survey showed that most funders want to invest in long-term positive changes (71%), yet none expected outcomes to take five to ten years.  Instead, the majority of funders said they expected to see outcomes in just one to two years."

I've used the graphic below for many years to show that kids in middle school require four to six years of continuous support just to finish high school and another four to six to get through college. Even then, if they don't have people in their network who can help open doors to jobs, that degree may not be enough to help them reach their full potential.

The kids in the photo on the left were part of the Cabrini Connections program in the mid 1990s. We operated in the third time frame, after 5pm, when workplace volunteers were more consistently available to serve as tutors and mentors and program leaders.  The photo at the right is one of the teens shown on the left, who was the graduation speaker in 2010.  I'm connected to her and many other alumni on Facebook, and thrilled to see many of them with advanced college degrees and many showing photos of their own kids finishing high school and college.

I could not have convinced donors in the mid 1990s that this was the long-term outcome we wanted. Thus we struggled each year to patch together the funds needed to operate.  Ultimately, this was the fundamental reason I left Cabrini Connections in 2011 and formed the Tutor/Mentor Institute, LLC to try to continue supporting the city-wide strategies of the T/MC. 

If you read the MENTOR report you'll see that many other programs, in 2023, are struggling the same way.

This entire blog, written since 2005, and the www.tutormentorexchange.net website, launched in 1998, offer ways to change how programs are funded, and how this can lead to constantly improving non-school tutor, mentor and learning programs that reach kids in more high poverty areas....which is where long-term, mentor-rich programs are most needed.

This graphic was created by an intern from South Korea nearly 10 years ago, who was prompted by a similar graphic in articles like this from 2009.  

The goal is that groups of people gather regularly, like people in faith groups do, or people in high school or college classes, or in business, to look for ways to solve problems, using information that I and others aggregate in web libraries and share in articles like this.

Below is a graphic showing part of a Tutor/Mentor blog article written in 2009, 25 years after the murder of Ben Wilson in Chicago.

I highlighted "We are still having this conversation 25 years after the death of Ben Wilson because the writers ..... don't focus on ways to build a consistent flow of operating dollars to help constantly improving youth serving programs be in all the neighborhoods where kids need this help, for dozens of years, not just for one workshop, or for one intensive intervention...."

That's just about what the MENTOR report was saying.  

So what can you do? Form a learning circle, just as the graphic above suggests.  Read something every week, then talk about what it means and how the ideas might apply where you are, and based on who you are.  

Every one of my articles has tags at the bottom, which you can see at the left side of this blog.  You can use these to focus your discussions.

Or you can go to my Wakelet page and look at collections of blog articles. 

Or, you can visit this Tumblr site and look at the articles I've posted there, which represent most of the key ideas I've been sharing.

As you do your learning share your understanding and ideas with your own graphics, concept maps, videos, etc.  

8-19-2024 update - here's another article that focuses on the funding issue. It's titled "Should we pay for relationships? Why philanthropy needs to invest in social capital?"

Connect with me on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, etc. and share your work with me so I can learn from you and share your ideas with my own network.

The MENTOR research shows the challenges and a path forward.  It's not a new path, because I and others have pointed to these challenges for many years.

The question is, will you say ENOUGH, and begin to take actions so we're not having this conversation again in 25 years?