Sharing the successes we each have. My 1995 vision.

Below is text of a letter I wrote in June 1995, to the Executive Director of the COMPACT youth program, in Orlando, Florida.  It shows what I was doing then, and what still needs to be happening in 2024 and beyond.  

Is someone in your community taking this role?

---- begin 1995 letter ----

"One of the most important lessons we've learned is how extraordinarily isolated are people and groups which share common goals and vision." said Rebecca Riely of Chicago's John D. and Catherine M. MacArthur Foundation at a 1995 city forum.

The 1994 Tutor/Mentor Connection (T/MC) survey of 200 Chicago tutor/mentor programs reported similar findings.  More than half the 120 programs who responded had "little or no contact with others doing similar work."  

What Ms. Riely did not say is that reducing isolation requires a commitment to gather and share information.  While there are many who collect and library data, there are few who work to give this data life by serving as a match-maker between good ideas and good people.  The T/MC was formed in 1993 to serve this role among tutor/mentor programs in Chicago, and as we've been doing this, we are learning from good programs around the country, while also sharing what work is being done here.

In the 20 years I've been leading a tutoring program in Chicago's Cabrini-Green public housing area, no city, state, national organization or major foundation, has ever established a consistent outreach into Chicago's neighborhoods to learn what tutor/mentor programs were operating, where they were, or what they were doing, nor to approach them with a "How can I help you succeed?" attitude. Nor has there been any concentrated or consistent effort to identify which neighborhoods are underserved, either through lack of programs, or lack of programs for a specific age group, then to develop and lead a marketing program which would fill those gaps.

The founders of Cabrini Connections and the T/MC had these conditions in mind in the fall of 1992 when Cabrini Connections was organized. While keeping a commitment to serve teens in Cabrini-Green (through an afterschool program we operated at the Montgomery Ward national headquarters), the T/MC branch of Cabrini Connections was formed to reduce this isolation through active research and information-sharing efforts, linking tutor/mentor program throughout Chicago, and America, and by linking networks of related service providers, such as Science Linkages in the Community, The Chicago Bar Association and the Illinois Intergenerational Initiative, with individual programs and groups of programs.

I don't think anyone has a monopoly on the answers to the problems of our inner cities, but I do think we can get there by sharing the successes we each have.  In addition, I'm not sure that by ourselves we can continue to build our programs over the generation it will take to succeed in the neighborhoods we serve, but by supporting each other, we can build the will-power to keep our work going along with the new resources of people, brains, money and energy that long-term growth must have to be successful.

When the T/MC reaches out to programs its goal is to learn about the organizational structure and workings of different programs, with the goal of including that information in the T/MC library, and sharing it with programs in Chicago.  

Following are some questions we tried to find answers to:

* Where do mentors meet with students?
* What training (orientation, initial, on-going) do mentors receive? Can you share samples of your training materials?
* How do you communicate with mentors (newsletter, etc.?)
* What contact records do you keep? How do you audit the frequency of contact between a tutor/mentor and a student?  For example, if you have 100 pairs, and a 50 week schedule, are you able to show a contact frequency of 100%? 80%?
* What screening do you do? What is the cost? Who pays?
* How long, on average, do volunteer tutors and/or mentors stay with your program?
* Are other nonprofits in your city providing similar services?  If so, do you network with them?
* How do you evaluate the program? What methodology do you use to quantify program results?
* Do you have studies that quantify the effect of mentoring that can be shared? Getting good hard documentation is difficult, but it is what business needs to see to invest in these types of programs.

I've asked a lot of questions, but I operate a program, and these are questions I deal with every day in making Cabrini Connections succeed. For us to increase the reach and effect of programs like ours to thousands of children across America, program managers are going to need to learn from each other, and to document the outcomes in a manner that can draw funds to keep programs growing.

--- end June 1995 ----

The survey the T/MC used in 1994 and through 2009 can be viewed in this PDF.  

Why Cabrini Connections and Tutor/Mentor Connection? - read what I wrote in 1993 - click here

Every article posted on this blog since 2005, and in our printed newsletters since 1993, has focused on this "How can we do this better?" question. 

I've used maps, and pointed to research, that shows that there are pockets of concentrated, persistent poverty in every major city in America, as well as in rural areas and on reservations.  These are places where other leaders could be learning from my own efforts, and my library, to build their own information-based intermediary, to achieve the same goals we set when we launched Cabrini-Connections and the Tutor/Mentor Connection in late 1992.

I've a collection of articles showing roles universities could take, which you can browse at this link.  

I created the Tutor/Mentor Institute, LLC in 2011 in an effort to keep the Tutor/Mentor Connection available in Chicago, and help similar intermediaries grow in other cities.  This was after the Board of Directors at Cabrini Connections voted to no longer support the strategy, and focus only on our single kids' program.  

I've managed, barely, to do this. 

If you've read what I wrote in 1995 and see the need for this work to continue, share my work and help recruit leaders who will reach out to me, to take ownership of my archive and strategies, and turn them into teaching tools, to help future leaders.

Connect with me on social media, to share what I'm doing and share what YOU are doing.

And, visit this page and make a small contribution to help me keep doing this work for another year, or more.