I created this graphic a few years ago to share my fear for the alumni of volunteer-based tutor/mentor programs I led, and for their children, and grand children.
This was reinforced yesterday when I watched baseball star, Reggie Jackson, talk about the racial discrimination that he faced when playing in the 1960s and 1970s. You can view the video on Twitter (x)
at this link.
These are among many things happening locally, nationally and globally that scare me.
Locally, I see stories daily showing Black and Brown kids and adults shot and often killed in intentional and random shootings. I see growing evidence that our highest source of justice, the Supreme Court, is corrupt and under the control of religious extremists. While we're hopeful that November's US elections will bring control of the US House back to Democrats and Progressives, expand the majority in the Senate, and keep the White House, that's no guarantee that any of the terrible things happening in the US and the world will change.
Here are two articles that add to my sense of despair.
One article shows how right wing political movements and ideologies have grown around the world, fueled by social media and uses of the Internet. A
second article digs into the Wikipedia world and find a lot of things that stink.
Here's a
cMap where I point to many more issues that concern me.
Each node on this concept map opens to a collection of websites with an extensive range of articles that I wish I had had when I studied history, social studies and political science in high school and college in the 1960s.
Thinking local. Fearing global.
It's in the context of thinking of the long-term impact resulting from how we're electing right-wing leaders in the US and throughout the world that I re-examine my own long term efforts to help well-organized, volunteer-based, non-school tutor and/or mentor programs grow in high poverty areas of Chicago, where adults connect with youth when they are as young as elementary school, then stay connected through high school, and into adult lives.
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| Birth to Work goal |
That's what the graphic at the right visualizes.
The kids in the upper left were in 7th and 8th grade when this photo was taken in the mid 1990s. I'm pictured at the right in late 2000s photo when one of these kids, Tanjela Smith Marlow, came back to talk at the annual year end dinner. It's 2024. Tanji and I are still connected on Facebook. We've been exchanging ideas about my work over the past month and had a ZOOM call this week. That's what I mean by "long-term".
Below is a page from the
2000 February-March issue of the printed newsletter that I was able to mail to about 10,000 people. I started sending these in 1993, but then the mail list was about 400. It grew each year from 1994-2002, but never reach more than 14,000. In the early 2000s eMail and web sites took the place of the printed newsletters as I ran out of money to continue them.
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| Feb-March 2000 T/MC Report |
This article includes a map of Chicago, showing high poverty areas where organized tutor/mentor programs are most needed, as a way to expand the social capital, or network of people and experiences, for kids who have a limited based of work and career models, and people opening doors to opportunity, in their lives.
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| Connect your network to information |
Here's a graphic that communicates the same idea. On both graphics the large circle represents the
information library that I have been building since I started leading a single tutor/mentor program in Chicago in 1975.
The circle also represents a meeting place, or community of people, who gather on a regular basis, like people in faith groups do, and people in classrooms do, to learn from a central library information and ideas, and to innovate ways they could help tutor/mentor programs grow in different parts of the city and suburbs.
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| Anyone can take this role |
I took this to another level when starting the Tutor/Mentor Connection in 1993. In my 1973-1990 retail advertising career at Montgomery Ward's corporate headquarters in Chicago we supported 400 stores in 40 US states, through the work of various central office teams. They could do that because they knew where existing stores were located, and where there were potential customers for new stores.
By building a library of information, and a directory of existing tutor/mentor programs, my goal was that people in these learning and planning groups would begin to think of ways they could help all youth tutor/mentor programs within a geographic area get the ideas, dollars, talent, technology and other things
each program needs to be great at what they do.
Instead of every program constantly reaching into a small pool of resources for what they need to operate, my vision has that others who care about what these programs were trying to do, would use their own time and talent to help mobilize these resources and push them to programs in every part of the city...based on the
list of programs I was hosting (and still do),
My success over the past 30 years has been hindered by disasters like Montgomery Ward, our main sponsor, going out of business in 2000, and by the 9/11 terror attack, the following wars, natural disasters, then the financial melt-down of 2008, and finally, in 2011, the Board of Directors deciding to discontinue the Tutor/Mentor Connection strategy and focus only on our single Cabrini Connections program..
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| Mayor Daley at 1997 T/MC Conference |
However, I also was never able to get consistent, in-depth, support from Mayor Daley, major foundations, or other civic leaders. I had one business person visit my office in the 1990s and after I walked him through the strategy he said "I love what you're doing, but I'll never support you....because I want to start my own thing."
Since 2011 I've not had an organizational structure to help me continue the Tutor/Mentor Connection. I created the Tutor/Mentor Institute, LLC with the hope that I could generate revenue through consulting or by finding partners to invest in this strategy. That has not happened. As I write this I'm wondering where the money will come from to keep my bills paid for the rest of this year...and into 2025.
Yet the need for non-school youth serving organizations reaching k-12 youth in high poverty areas is as great today as it was in 1993.
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| Enough is Enough - link |
That brings me back to the start of this article. Kids entering school today will take 12 years to finish high school and another four to eight years to be starting stable jobs and careers.
That's 20 years.
What will the world look like in 20 years? Will people of color, people of different faiths or different gender identities, or who are fleeing conflict in their own countries, be seeking a refuge from the terror in America by then?
Will sports and entertainment stars tell of a different lived experience, free of racism, violence and discrimination based on the color of their skin?
Or will we have gone through a third World War, fueled by nationalist leaders in the USA and different countries? Will there have been civil wars within the US and other countries, pitting extremist ideologies against each other?
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| Knowledge base needed - link |
Local-Global Strategy.
While my local focus has been to help youth tutor/mentor programs grow in Chicago neighborhoods, the process I've piloted is knowledge-based problem solving. If someone aggregates information about a problem others can use that information to innovate solutions.
With this in mind I've begun to expand the knowledge base I host, pointing to articles about social justice, inequality, poverty, etc. I also point to articles about the climate crisis and about some of the political issues that I feel need to be better understood by more people.
To help people navigate the information I've been collecting, I created
this article, which has a list of links to various sections of my web library.
Using this, anyone can start to do their own learning, and can begin to form a circle of friends, family, co-workers and faith group, who dig deeper into this information and try to create a different future than the one we seem to speeding into.
Is it enough? I feel that I'm pushing a huge rock up a steep mountain, with too little help, and too many other issues competing for attention. With the growth of right wing governments I fear the mountain itself will collapse, and what we do to build systems of support for disadvantaged youth will have no benefit.
Or, will this be the only thing that matters? Even if the entire world is in flames, our will to survive will continue to burn brightly, and our need to provide systems of support for our kids, and each other, will still be with us.
If you can help me keep this information resource available, visit my FundMe page.
While I seek help, I also seek partners or a way to make the resources and ideas I've aggregated since 1993 a part of the work others are doing. Visit
this article describing "a bold experiment called MITx U.Lab" and compare what they are describing to what I've described in this and other articles on this blog. How can I get this group to adopt the Tutor/Mentor Institute, LLC as one of its focus areas?
7-5-2024 update - I learned that today's shooting in Chicago, were two women and a boy were killed, took the life of
Nakeeshia Strong, who was part of an extended family that, in the early 1990s, was part of the tutoring program I led. This is what I fear.
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