I was recruited to be a volunteer in the company-sponsored, employee-led, tutor/mentor programs in the fall of 1973 and selected to be its leader in the summer of 1975. In the following years I applied many of my retail advertising lessons to how I communicated to volunteers and donors. I'm still connected to Leo Hall, who I was matched with in 1973 when he was in 4th grade.
Below is a graphic I created in 1986 to show the organizational chart of the tutoring program.
I share this as a transition to how I've been using visual essays for the past 25+ years to communicate strategies of the Tutor/Mentor Connection, which I formed in 1993, and the Tutor/Mentor Institute, LLC, which I formed in 2011.
From August 1993 to mid 1999 we had offices on the 20th floor of the Montgomery Ward Corporate Office building, where we operated the Cabrini Connections Tutor/Mentor Program and from where we organized and led the Tutor/Mentor Connection.
I used one entire wall to share our four part strategy and often would walk volunteers and potential donors and partners through that information. Unfortunately, I often heard many say "He's really excited, but I don't know what he's talking about."
That prompted me to start using desktop publishing and PowerPoint to create visualizations that I could share to communicate strategies. I've been updating the collection for the past month and below are two that I finished updating this week.
A Role for Intermediaries and Consultants -I used one entire wall to share our four part strategy and often would walk volunteers and potential donors and partners through that information. Unfortunately, I often heard many say "He's really excited, but I don't know what he's talking about."
That prompted me to start using desktop publishing and PowerPoint to create visualizations that I could share to communicate strategies. I've been updating the collection for the past month and below are two that I finished updating this week.
A Role for Intermediaries a... by Daniel F. Bassill
Collective Effort Required to Support Youth Mentoring Programs
Collective Effort Required ... by Daniel F. Bassill
These are just two of more than 60 essays that you can find on this page of the Tutor/Mentor Institute, LLC website.
In 2011 I started putting these on Scribd.com because I was not getting a visit count from just embedding the PDF on my website. In 2012 I began putting them on https://www.slideshare.net/tutormentor, too, because it had a different viewing format, and did not charge a fee to view the PDFs.
Scribd.com bought Slideshare a couple of years ago, so it now charges a fee, too. However, what I've learned is that while I can update new versions to Scribd.com, and keep the visit history and URL address, on Slideshare I need to upload a new version, and delete the old one. That breaks all the links to the PDF that I've embedded in past blog articles. If you open an article and the presentation is not appearing, that's the reason.
Thus, while I will keep updating the presentations on Slideshare, I will probably point to the articles on Scribed.com more often in the future.
I believe that every city with areas of concentrated poverty could use a map-based strategy like the Tutor/Mentor Connection so I invite people to look at the PDFs, decide if the strategy could be used in their own city, than create and share their own versions.
I say "don't reinvent the wheel". Use what I 've learned over the past 30 years to jump-start your own efforts.
Connect with me on Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook and/or Mastodon and I'll be happy to guide you through the library and discuss ways a university might take ownership of my archives, and support the growth of local tutor/mentor programs and intermediaries through the work of students, faculty and alumni.
In the meantime, to keep me going, and paying the bills, please visit this page and send a small contribution.
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