Network Building - A Process

I've been building the Tutor/Mentor library since 1993 when I formed the Tutor/Mentor Connection. 

The mission of the Tutor/Mentor Institute (T/MI) is to gather and organize all that is known about successful non-school tutoring/mentoring programs and apply that knowledge to expand the availability and enhance the effectiveness of these services to children throughout the Chicago region.

My daily journey through the Internet uncovers many resources that I add to the library. I draw attention to these by my e-mail newsletter, my blogs, my posts on social media, and my website.

Last Friday, and again today, I participated in a ZOOM call hosted by the Strategic Doing community, which I've followed on LinkedIn for many years. Below is a screenshot from last week's presentation, which you can view at this link.

If you view the mission statement of the Tutor/Mentor Connection you'll see that I've been trying to build a knowledge network, or ecosystem, of people, organizations and ideas that anyone can use to help kids from birth-to-work.

In today's ZOOM call the topic was "how universities solve complex problems".  Below is one of  many visualizations I've created to show long-term support kids need to move from birth-to-work.

I think universities could play a much greater role in helping kids in high poverty areas move through school, and college, into jobs, and then spend a lifetime helping others and working to solve complex social, economic and global problems.  

The challenge has always been to find someone in the university who would devote their career to building such a support system, involving others from the university, as well as alumni, business and community assets.

The graphic above is from this page on the Tutor/Mentor Institute, LLC website, showing eLearning goals that I first began to share back in the early 2000s.   

I organized Tutor/Mentor Leadership and Networking Conferences in Chicago every six months from May 1994 to May 2015 to bring parts of this ecosystem together.  The eLearning goals were developed as IUPUI helped us host our first (and only) on-line conference in 2004. My work on social media is a continuation of this effort.

The graphic below was created by students from Indiana University, and shows participation of organizations from throughout the USA in these conferences.

You can view the map in this article, and see universities that hosted conferences in this article.  

Below is a graphic showing work interns from different universities did between 2005 and 2015 to help me communicate ideas and strategies. 

These show what's possible from university engagement, but also share my frustration for never have been able to find a long-term partner at any of these universities who would apply their own time, talent and dollars to the strategies I've shared in many articles on this blog.

This has been made even more difficult as platforms where I connected with people have constantly changed over the past 20 years.  Even the www.tutormentorconnection.org site that was my primary resource from 1998 to 2018 is no longer available.

Since 2013 Twitter has been a growing source of network building and idea sharing. But recent changes in ownership are making that site much less reliable. So I've launched myself on new platforms.

Mastodon is one place where I can now be found.  It is a decentralized network of meeting places.  I've actually set up accounts on three, and am not yet close to the number of followers I have on Twitter.

Bluesky is another where I've recently began to build a network.  As with Mastodon, I'm not yet close to the following I have on Twitter. 

I have a page on the Tutor/Mentor website with links to these platforms and others where I'm trying to connect.  That's where you can also find my monthly newsletter. 

I've a section in the Tutor/Mentor library focused on collaboration and community building.  It has more than 50 links, including one to the Strategic Doing website.

One of the many challenges we face in solving complex problems is "drawing people to engage with each other,  on OUR platform.  I've spent 30 years building a body of knowledge on MY platform and on some of my social media networks.  Going into a platform hosted by someone else, and building a network is a huge challenge. It takes time. That's time I (and others) need to be spending drawing people to our platforms, and maintaining the quality of their content.

This is one reason there are so many silos, of people and organizations not connecting strategically with each other.  

In today's ZOOM call I asked the speaker if he had done any network analysis to know who was participating in his planning groups, and who was missing.  I had in mind the network analysis maps done by an intern working for me in 2010, which you can see in this blog article.  And, in this series of blog articles. 

One way I try to connect people is by putting them in my library and sharing their links via concept maps like the one below.  

This shows intermediaries in Chicago who focus on the well-being of youth.

If you look at the map you'll see a yellow text box in the lower right corner with the heading "Help Update This".  It asks "are there other Chicago area intermediary groups that can be added to this map? And it says "I need research help to know what businesses,  universities, philanthropy orgs, etc. support volunteer based tutor/mentor programs in Chicago."

If someone is hosting that information on their website I can add them to my library and my maps and help them connect those organizations to each other.  

This is work students at any high school or university could be doing....to help me update my Chicago area information, and to build similar maps and libraries for other communities.

One of the comments on today's Strategic Doing call came from someone in the business community who talked of how there is a need to achieve results through short term involvement. That's one of the problems.  Look at the graphic below, which you can view in this article.

This visualizes a goal of pulling youth through school and into adult lives, with support starting as early as preschool and lasting each year for 20-30 year....for each youth! Just building a network of stakeholders who understand and support this goal would take several years. Building such a network at many universities would take even longer.  Getting agreement on goals and setting up programs that engage students, faculty, alumni and community would take even longer. Then comes the year-to-year work, evaluation and constant improvement that improves what the university community does, and fills high poverty areas surrounding a university with a pipeline of birth-to-college-to-work programs.

Note that the far right part of this graphic focuses on helping some students graduate and take life-time careers in direct service programs while others graduate who make life-long commitments to support these alumni with time, talent and dollars.

Show me a university with a visualization that communicates this goal.  Or that is connecting the ecosystem of the university in efforts to achieve the goal.

There's no way I can communicate this with an introduction on a new platform, or a social media post, or a comment during a ZOOM call.  I need to motivate people to read my blog articles and study the information on my website, then share what they are learning via their own blogs and videos, just as interns did between 2005 and 2015.

However, this needs to be a multi-year learning process, perhaps part of a Masters or PhD program, not a short term internship.

Who can help make that happen?  

Thanks for reading. And thank you to those who visit this page and send contributions to help me do this work.