Disaster Recovery, Mentoring Kids to Careers - Long Term Commitment Needed

The Southeast part of the United States has been hit by a massive hurricane, with rain and flooding extending into several states, affecting millions of people. 

This map is from The Weather Channel, in this article posted on Sept. 27, 2024. 

The flooding is on-going as I write this. Clean-up, recovery, then re-building will come in the next few weeks, months and years.  

This reminded me of an article I wrote in September 2017, following the hurricane that hit Texas and Louisiana.  My message now, is the same as it was then. I hope you'll read it.

---- begin 9-2017 article ----

Recovery efforts are now taking place in Texas, Louisiana and other places in the world where floods have caused recent human tragedy.
At the same time, school is starting in Chicago and other places, including in flooded areas, and kids living in high poverty areas are facing an on-going human tragedy of too little support from home, community and school.

There are some common challenges in both areas.

see this map

I launched the Tutor/Mentor Connection (T/MC) in 1993 in an effort to build a master data-base of non-school tutor and/or mentor programs operating in the Chicago region, in an effort to provide information that leaders in business, politics, education, philanthropy, etc. could use to determine if there were enough programs serving different age groups in all of the city's high poverty neighborhoods.  My goal was that the maps and database I was hosting would be used to support on-going public education and marketing plans intended to draw ideas and resources to programs, while helping programs network and learn from each other.

The goal was to have great programs in every neighborhood, not a few great programs in only a few places.

 You can find my list of programs and most updated map here.

In the years since it has served as a resource for parents, social workers, librarians, etc. to help parents find services for their kids.  Just last week I received a message saying,

"Looking for Mentoring programs for young girls and boys  from the age of 7-16 years of age in the Near North Area."

Over the past 23 year's I've responded to these requests by pointing people to the directory and list of programs, so they could shop and choose from what was available. I've often had to say "none there", which means you and your community need to start programs if your kids are to be served. I've offered the information on my web sites as a resource for such efforts.

I've never had much help doing this, and even less since 2011, however, the need still exists.  Thus, I seek volunteers and partners who will help me keep the information up-to-date and help build awareness so more people use the resource. View this presentation then read more below.

Community Information Collection: A Shared Effort by Daniel F. Bassill on Scribd

Without a map showing where help is needed and what organizations are providing services, with layers showing age group served and type of programs offered, it's impossible to know if a city has enough needed services in all the places where they are needed.

I seek people who will:

a) adopt a section of the city and review youth program web sites; make sure they are working; tell me of broken links, or new programs that I need to add. Get to know what these programs do, and how they differ from each other. Share news about these programs via social media, blogs, church bulletins, company newsletters, etc.

b) dig deeper into the theory of change and design of programs. Look at similar programs throughout the country/world and build a list of "what looks best" type programs that others can learn from.  Update this regularly.  Build an understanding of what type of program design is best for the needs of different age groups and client groups.

c) help me update my own technology and communications capacity. Look for ways to share ownership and carry this into the future.  This is all part of a four-part strategy described in this article.

Now, how does this relate to disaster relief?

https://weather.com map

Without maps showing the areas flooded by the recent Hurricane, with overlays showing service providers needed at different stages of recovery, high profile areas like Houston will draw most of the recovery resources while lesser visibility areas will receive too little.  Even within Houston it's likely that more affluent neighborhoods will attract greater support than the high poverty areas.

2024 note: To illustrate the difficulty of keeping attention focused on disaster areas for many years, the links in this 2017 article that are in bold face, are no longer working. 

For instance, https://weather.com and  this ESRI site provides numerous maps showing flood areas.  The maps are professionally done and provide great information about where the damage was greatest.  However, they don't include overlays of recovery support organizations who need volunteer and donor help to do their work.

Here's a site, called "harvyneeds.org" that is showing resources people are looking for, with a map showing shelters.  SketchCity, a tech group in Texas, has been creating some information-based maps, like the one showing shelters.

This is all useful, but is it enough?

What help do kids in poverty need? What help do disaster recovery areas need?  I've been using cMaps to create a visual blueprint that shows different supports kids need as they move through school and into jobs and careers.

http://tinyurl.com/TMI-K-CareerMentoring

These supports are needed in every high poverty neighborhood for many years. Thus far, I know of no one collecting and mapping such information, like I describe in the presentation shown above, to show availability,  and provide support, for all of these needed services.

Here's a HBR article talking about the impact of Harvey on poor people and advocating for prevention efforts, before the disaster occurs. Here's another from the Washington Post. Many issues mentioned in these articles represent nodes on a concept map like mine.

Concept maps and other visual tools could be used to show the various short and long-term disaster recovery support needed, not just in Houston, but throughout the world.

Visualizations like mine might already be available some place within the US and worldwide disaster-relief ecosystem.  If they are I don't see people on social media pointing to these and calling on volunteers and donors to use them to guide their efforts.

I don't know. Maybe readers who do know will share links.

What I do know is that many volunteers, donors and leaders are needed to collect, organize and maintain such information, and keep it updated for many years.  And many more are needed to build the daily and on-going marketing and communications needed to draw volunteers and donors to the information, and then to all of the areas where kids, or disaster victims, need help, now, and will need help many years more into the future.

---- end 2017 article ---

If you're creating websites with links that connect recovery efforts with resources and provide maps that encourage a distribution of resources to all the affected areas,  please share links in the comment section of this article and on social media.  Hopefully such websites will still be active five or six years from now.

This is not the first time I've written about using maps to distribute resources to all areas affected by natural or man-made disasters.  I wrote this article in 2005, the first year of hosting this blog.

While it's too early to have this conversation, Hurricane Helene comes just five weeks before our national and state elections, which will determine the future direction of the United States.  The disaster area covers such a large area of a few key states that I expect to find articles soon that try to figure out which candidate will be hurt the most, or will benefit the most.  

That's crazy to be thinking about now, but one party wants to cut public funding for disaster relief and climate action. The other wants to invest in solutions and build opportunity in communities across the country.  People who have lost their homes, and maybe all personal identification, will struggle to vote.  What states will make it easier for them?  

If you've read this article, thank you.  Our consistent, on-going, attention to these issues will be needed in the next few years, and the next few decades.

While disaster relief will be seeking donations, and political campaigns seek donations,  I also seek your help to enable me to continue to host my library and share ideas like this. Visit this page if you want to help me. 

Hey CEO! Take this role!

Today on my Twitter feed I saw a post about "How employers can transform the lives of marginalized young people through mentoring" from the Youth Futures Foundation, based in the UK. I opened the website and looked around and found the recommendations for business leaders that I show below.

The website has a lot of good information about what mentoring is and its value.  It's worth adding to your learning library.  However, what I found really valuable is how it was targeting business leaders and encouraging them to develop strategies that support mentoring.

That's what I've been doing since forming the Tutor/Mentor Connection in Chicago in 1993 and the Tutor/Mentor Institute, LLC in 2011.

I led a volunteer-based tutor/mentor program from 1975 to 2011.  For the first 15 years we were a company sponsored program and I held a full-time retail advertising job.  My constant focus was building student participation, providing meaningful learning activities, and recruiting and retaining volunteers and converting some into leaders who would help me plan and operate the program each year.  When we converted that to a non-profit in 1990, I had to learn how to find the dollars needed to pay for my salary, my staff, and program expenses. That challenge continued through 2011.

It led me to form the Tutor/Mentor Connection in 1993, borrowing ideas from my work in retail advertising at Montgomery Ward and from serving as a Loaned Executive at Chicago's United Way/Crusade of Mercy for four years, as well as the learning and networking I had been doing with other Chicago programs since I first became a volunteer in 1973.  

At Wards, functional teams at the corporate office in Chicago, and at regional offices, supported the operations of over 400 stores, distributed in 40 states.  While each store served customers, the corporate office made sure they had the resources to do that effectively.  They even used millions of dollars in advertising to draw shoppers to EVERY store, not just a few high profile stores.

At the United Way corporate leaders were recruited as Chief Crusaders, who would call on other CEOs to motivate them to build fund raising campaigns and make their own personal pledges.

The strategy the Tutor/Mentor Connection developed in 1993 was to build an information base showing where tutor/mentor programs were most needed, why they were needed, and ways volunteers, donors and businesses could help each program grow.  We added to this a comprehensive list of Chicago area, volunteer-based tutor/mentor programs, and used maps to show where they were located, with overlays showing where they were most needed.

Then we built a year-round communications program intended to draw programs together and attract students, volunteers and donors to each program

Using this any corporate leader could make the commitment shown in the Concept Map below, putting the company name, or CEO name, in the blue box at the top.  

In the middle of the concept map is the 4-part strategy that supports these commitments. It's visualized in this concept map.

Almost every article posted on this blog since I started it in 2005 focuses on this strategy. Our print and email newsletters, started in 1993, do the same. 

Last May I shared a few of my print newsletters in this blog article.  One of those is shown below. It's from 2001 and shows a CEO commitment similar to what is shown on the Youth Futures Foundation website. 

I started sharing those steps in the mid 1990s.  You can now see them in this Role of Leaders PDF. 

In many of my blog articles and PDF essays I use maps to focus attention on supporting youth tutor/mentor programs in every high poverty area of cities like Chicago.

Furthermore, I've created an entire library of concept maps to visualize the information available in my library and the actions needed to reach kids in high poverty areas with long-term mentor-rich programs.

In this article I show a few of those, including the one I show below, which is one of three that make a case for business to build strategic investment in long-term, volunteer-based tutor, mentor and learning programs.

When I saw the link to the Youth Futures Foundation today, one of the first things I did was visit http://www.tutormentorexchange.net to see if I already had it included in my library.  Yes. I added it in 2023.  Thus, while I was reminded of their work again today, the link has been available for over a year to anyone visiting my library for ideas.

While I've piloted the Tutor/Mentor Connection since 1993 in the Chicago region, I've tried to help other communities build similar strategies, in the USA, and around the world.  Below is a map from a Brookings Edu. article that I posted on the Mapping for Justice blog.

This map shows neighborhoods of concentrated poverty in the USA.  Every one of these could benefit from a strategy similar to the Tutor/Mentor Connection.  In fact, if someone were to look at this and say, "I can do that", I'd say, "Use all the information in my website and library, by linking to it."  

You only need to collect information showing where youth programs are needed in your community, and what programs already exist. Then you need to develop a year-round strategy (which you can borrow from what I piloted) to draw people together to learn from the information you're collecting and to draw resources to existing programs or help new ones start where more are needed.

You don't need to start from scratch!

This applies in the UK, South America, Africa, Asia and other places where youth live in areas of concentrated poverty without mentor-rich support systems helping them go to and through school and into adult lives free from poverty's grip.

I'd be happy to guide you through this information.  Just reach out to me on social media, or leave a comment on this blog.

There's over 30 years of information aggregated on my site so I encourage you to enlist university and high school partners, with youth doing research about what's here and why it's important, then sharing that with the "adults in the room" via their own presentations.  This blog shows examples of how that might be done.

Thanks for reading, and (hopefully) sharing!  Sign up for my monthly newsletter - click here. 

I've not drawn a salary since mid 2011 for leading the Tutor/Mentor Institute, LLC and keeping this information available to you and others. Thus, if you're able to help me with a contribution, please visit this page. 

Read my September newsletter

 

I sent my current newsletter out yesterday.  It shares my own experiences from leading a volunteer-based tutor/mentor program for 35 years to help similar programs reach k-12 youth in 2024 and beyond.

Read it at this link. 

Please share the newsletter and the links I point to with leaders in every sector. The strategy I've piloted calls on a shared responsibility for making on-going, mentor-rich programs available to youth in high poverty areas, with volunteers, donors, media and policy makers searching out programs and offering support based on what the program shows on their website, and what the research says about the potential of long-term, relationship-based programs.

Look for me on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, BlueSky and Mastodon.  Find links on this page. 

Share your own blogs, websites, videos and strategies and help me and others learn from you!

Help Fund This Work

At the end of many of my articles I have a request, asking for readers to make contributions to help Fund the work I do to collect and share information that helps kids in high poverty areas connect with volunteers in organized tutor, mentor and learning programs.

Open this link and you'll find the page shown below. 

With your help I can continue.

 If someone you know has become ill and needs money to pay bills, they set up a "Go Fund Me" page and ask for contributions. They are not 501-c-3 non profits. They are people needing help.

The Tutor/Mentor Institute, LLC is not operating as a non profit either. However, it's also not a profit-making business. So, this is my "fund me" page. I (Daniel Bassill) have been self-funding this work since 2011, supported by a small group of continuing donors.

Please add your support.  Send a contribution of $25, $50, $100, $250, $500 or more to help me continue in 2024, 2025 and beyond.

Thank you.

Remembering 9/11 - How much sacrifice is enough?

Today people in the USA and friends from around the world are pausing for a few moments to remember the lives lost in the 9/11 tragedy and in the 24-year war on terrorism that has taken place sense then.

I add my prayers of hope and remembrance to the families of those directly, and indirectly, affected by these events. 

However, I would like to go a step further.

I'd like to ask everyone to dig a bit deeper and to find a little more time to try to understand the poverty in the world that is a breeding ground for these events. While nature causes hurricanes, earthquakes, wildfires and floods, it is poverty that gives us the images of desperate people in affected areas.

While it is a small group of fanatics fanning the fire of terrorism, it is poverty that provides recruits for these fanatics.

Thus, it's poverty we need to understand and deal with.

While the US focuses on the tragedy unfolding in different parts of the world, I keep thinking of what will be needed for decades to help people in these areas recover from these disasters.

Since 2005 I've written a few articles following natural disasters. They all have the same pace. Urgent need and huge attention and outpouring of help as the tragedy unfolds.  Few using maps, so many areas where help is needed get little attention. In the years following one tragedy another happens and attention goes to a new crisis. Keeping attention and resources flowing five, 10 and 15 years after the tragedy is almost impossible.

That same flow of attention follows urban violence.

I've been reducing my paper trail and am scanning some of my news stories into my computer. Added this one from 1993, which is a letter to the editor written to the Chicago Tribune by Florence Cox, President of the Chicago Board of Education

I highlighted one section where she says:

"We must begin to realize that the needs of Chicago-area children are not being met, and in neglecting those needs, we neglect our own future as a prosperous and safe city."

Here's another article with some quotes from other stories, showing how difficult it is for this nation to focus on complex problems that require long-term attention and resources to be solved.

The headline is, "Action, not apologies, would help."

When I started the Tutor/Mentor Connection in 1993 one of four strategies was to generate more consistent attention to issues of poverty, violence, inequality, etc. drawing needed support to all of the non-school tutor/mentor programs operating in the Chicago region. I started using maps to show where they were most needed and where existing programs are located.  

I found another set of notes, with quotes I'd written down during speeches given during the 1997 President's Summit for America's Future, held in Philadelphia, PA.  I was there as a delegate from Chicago and as a Teaching Example exhibitor.

It starts with a quote from President Bill Clinton, saying, "This is the start of an era of big citizenship. The really important work will begin after my talk's over".  Click on the image to enlarge it and read the other quotes.

In the letter to the editor and in the Summit speeches, leaders are calling on Americans to become involved in solving complex problems.  The problem is, they have not made this call for people's involvement every day since then, and they have not pointed to web libraries and directories showing information people need to learn from, and lists of existing programs who need their help.

That's still a problem.

As I listened to Vice President Kamala Harris end last night's debate, I heard the same call for involvement.  I hope people look back 20 years from now and see this as a tipping point in how we solve problems in the world. 

I've tried to model what needs to be done, by my own actions and those of the Tutor/Mentor Connect ion (1993-present) and Tutor/Mentor Institute, LLC (2011-present).  I've had limited resources to do this, but continue with what I have.

Look at articles in the history, archive, about TMI sections at the left, to see what I've been trying to do.  

I keep hoping to find others who will help me...and will help provide the consistent attention needed to support people and organizations working with kids in all places where they are needed. I invite disaster recovery leaders, anti poverty leaders, education and workforce development leaders, and others, to borrow ideas from my archives and my library and apply them in their own work.

In this context, the next question is "how much time, talent and treasure" should one be expected to commit to this war on poverty? In the speeches that will be given today we'll honor those who gave the ultimate sacrifice. The number of dead will be totaled. In the background will be the number of families and children changed forever because a parent was lost in 9/11 or killed or severely wounded in the years since then.

When we think of this as 100% sacrifice, how do our own daily commitments of time, talent and treasure stack up? I'm not in a position to say what the appropriate level of giving should be. However, I can look in my own mirror every night and feel good about my own efforts.

I'd like to find a way that more people were looking in the mirror every night and doing more than just staring at a pretty face!!

This week and next week volunteer-based tutor/mentor programs will be holding orientations and training sessions for the volunteers who will become tutors/mentors in the 2024-25 school year.  I hope this will be starting them on a journey that is intended to stretch their involvement beyond two hours a week with one youth, to a commitment that draws the heart, body and spirit of a growing number into the efforts it takes to end poverty by helping kids move through school and into jobs/careers, and ending some of the harms that I point to in this section of the Tutor/Mentor library.

In the program I led from 1993 to 2011 we promised our kids "we'll do everything we can" to assure that you're starting a job/career by age 25. "Everything" is a lot. It's unconditional effort. It recognizes the potential of unleashing the talent of our volunteers, their friends and families, the people they work with, and the people they pray with or go to football games with, in efforts to end poverty and provide hope.

I'm now seeing stories on Facebook from some of these kids showing their college degrees and the journey of their own kids through school.  The year-to-year evidence could not show this result, but our ability to keep kids coming back each year through high school, was a prediction.

Visit this section of my library and find links to Chicago youth programs. Visit their websites. Look at their social media posts. Learn what they do, then decide how, and how much, you want to help them. Don't wait for a proposal, or to be asked.  Take the lead. Reach out to them.

Our efforts to unleash and focus more of the talents and time of our students, alumni and volunteers are the best memorial to 9/11 that I feel we can offer.

Thanks for reading.  Please connect with me on social media and share my posts so more people get t his information.

And, if you're able, send a contribution to help fund this work. Visit this page. 

Mapping Birth-to-Work Strategies

 I've used visualizations like the one below for more than 20 years to show the need for long-term, birth-to-work strategies, that reach K-12 youth in every high poverty area of Chicago and other places with concentrations of persistent poverty.

I included this graphic in this July 2018 article titled "After the march, do the planning".   It's one of more than 200 articles posted on this blog that focus on "violence" prevention and "planning".  My goal is that youth and adults from around the USA are are reading these articles and sharing their interpretations with friends, family and co-workers to help mentor-rich birth-to-work programs grow in every high poverty area of Chicago and other parts of the country.

You can look at the graphic above in several ways.

1) It includes a map, showing high poverty areas of Chicago. Programs that help kids through school and into adult lives need to be in every one of these zip codes.

2) The horizontal arrow shows the "birth-to-work" timeline, which takes 20-25 years for EVERY youth. Those in high poverty areas don't have the same range of natural support that kids in more affluent areas have, so those supports need to be made available through school and no-school hours programming.  I wrote this article focusing on some of the needed programming. 

3) You can also think of the graphic as a guide to investments needed.  Since the arrow, and the graphic above, shows stages kids grow through as they move from "birth-to-work", communities need to innovate ways to drive needed operating dollars, technology, talent and ideas into every high poverty neighborhood, making age appropriate programs available at each stage on the timeline.  Furthermore, at the right end of the arrow these supports need to be job training, interviews and JOBS!

Maps need to be use for multiple purposes. They can show demographic and poverty data as layers of information, pointing to places where people need extra help. 

They can show access routes through neighborhoods which might help volunteers see more places where they can connect with youth in organized programs.

They can show locations of programs, and potential support, such as banks, colleges, hospitals, faith groups, etc. We created a Chicago tutor/mentor Program Locator in 2004 and updated it in 2008 to enable people to create a map view showing small sections of the city, that could be used in planning.  It's now an archive due to lack of continued funding. 

Maps can also show who's involved, as these Tutor/Mentor Leadership and Networking Conference maps demonstrate.  

Most importantly, maps can show a distribution of dollars and involvement.  Foundations,  companies and government programs have the ability to create maps that show where their dollars are landing, and/or where company volunteers are involved as board members, or volunteers serving as tutors, mentors, tech support or marketing and fund raising support.  

But there are also other types of maps that planners should be using.  View the concept map shown in the graphic below at this link.  It shows supports needed at each grade level, in EVERY high poverty area of Chicago and other places.

Here's another concept map to look at.  It shows challenges facing people in high poverty areas. While building great school and non-school programs is needed, removing the barriers enables these schools to have greater success.

Now, take a look at maps created with systems mapping tools like KUMU.

I've posted several articles showing how planners can use tools like KUMU.  On LinkedIn I found this post, by KUMU, showing a planning process focused on family violence in Victoria, Canada.  Open the project map at this link.   

Look at other examples that I've posted in these articles, including one showing how Senator Elizabeth Warren used a KUMU map in her 2016 Presidential campaign to show her strategy for empowering American workers and raising wages.    

Using GIS maps to show where help is needed and systems maps to help understand a problem and potential solutions, and guide resources to places where help is needed, can lead to new and better implementation of solutions.

So far I can find too few examples of maps being used this way, thus, there is little accountability assuring that funds and resources support all stages of the "birth-to-work" timeline, in every zip code where such programs are needed.

I no longer have the organizational capacity to update the program locator and implement these ideas. Instead, I want to be part of planning teams who read these articles and are trying to innovate ways to implement them in different locations.

In this article I show my 30 year history of reaching out to universities, and my continued goal that one, or many, universities begin doing the work that I describe in this and other blog articles.

As places with a brick-and-mortar investment in communities and a pipeline of students coming from high school to college, then on into adult lives and careers, universities are uniquely able to adopt long-term planning, if donors will provide long-term funding!

If you're doing this work, please use my resources and archives and invite me to help you make sense of it all!

I'm on these social media channels. If you're interested in knowing more and starting a conversation, just reach out to me.

If you want to help fund the work I'm doing, just go to this page and use PayPal to send your support. 

Thank you for reading.

Labor Day - Now and In the Past

As I looked at articles I wrote on past Labor Day Holidays, I was trying to decide which I'd repost today. I decided I'd focus on this idea from 2011.


Do you think of Mentoring as a A Jobs Creation Strategy?

What if we could put thousand of unemployed people in long-term jobs while also helping more youth living in high poverty areas prepare for future jobs and careers?

In numerous articles being written on the 2011 Labor Day weekend the unemployment rate was stated as being between 9% and 16% reflecting people out of work, no longer looking, or under employed. In 2024 it is at 4.1% (see chart)

Many talk of rebuilding the nation’s infrastructure as a jobs creation strategy for putting people back to work. However, that does not address the large number of people who are in the birth to work pipeline who are not being adequately prepared for 21st century jobs and careers.

What if we had a jobs program that could create jobs for currently unemployed people and do more to help youth from inner city neighborhoods move successfully from high school to college and to jobs?

I’ve been aggregating information about poverty, poorly performing schools, social justice and workforce development for many years. This section of the Tutor/Mentor Connection web library contains many articles on this topic. (research library).

One article I found in 2011 is titled Overcoming Intergenerational Poverty (pdf). The writer (Donna Beegle, who you can find on LinkedIn) recounts her own struggle to get through college and does research to show the barriers others from areas with high concentrations of poverty face.

In one of the conclusions she says “"Mentoring and Social Capital
A strong link between mentor support and academic success emerged in my study of students from generational poverty. I found that if students had mentors early in life and in college, they were more likely to obtain a bachelor’s degree. Mentors facilitated their understanding of social capital possibilities, expanded their networks of support, and let them know about important resources. In addition, mentors helped generate trust, and once participants felt safe and trusted, they were able to share their poverty related experiences with others. As a result, they received more assistance.

Additionally, through their mentors, respondents learned new communication styles and behaviors that enabled them to communicate more effectively in the college environment. Mentors, and in most cases, the mentors’ connections, were pivotal when linking participants to information and contacts. This facilitated their success in achieving literacy and completing higher education. For example, mentors helped respondents understand the intricacies of filling out financial aid forms and taught them how to improve their study habits. In some cases, these resources reduced the stress of poverty and allowed the respondents to focus on their studies for the first time."”

Others are focusing on mentoring as a form of expanding social capital and my own view of a volunteer based tutor/mentor program shows youth surrounded by volunteers who come from diverse workplace backgrounds.  I've been visualizing this idea using the graphic below since the mid 1990s.

In a small tutor/mentor program with 50-70 pairs of youth and volunteers there could be five to 10 jobs. This infrastructure graphic shows what needs to be in place. 

The talent chart on page 5 of this Tutor/Mentor Institute PDF does the same. Most tutor/mentor programs don’t have this range of talent and they struggle. Our 1994 to 2010 surveys of tutor/mentor programs in Chicago shows many neighborhoods with few or no organized programs.

Since there are over 200,000 youth living in high poverty in the Chicago region, how many tutor/mentor programs might be needed to reach 50% of these? 500 programs with 75 youth each would cover the city and suburbs and still only reach about 38,000 kids.

How many jobs might be created if an effort were made to build a comprehensive network of tutor/mentor programs operating in all poverty areas of the city and suburbs. How many people might this put to work? How many internships might be created for youth in these programs? How might this contribute to the current economy in high poverty neighborhoods while also building the future workforce and lowering the costs of poverty at the same time?

Look at this article from 2022, with maps showing areas of concentrated poverty in the USA. 

Every one of these areas could use the strategy I piloted since 1993 through the Tutor/Mentor Connection, and have led through the Tutor/Mentor Institute, LLC since 2011. 

Maybe if we looked at this as a jobs and infrastructure program the government or some high profile foundations would take another look at this? What do you think?

I did not create the tutor/mentor programs I led, or the Tutor/Mentor Connection, by myself. I had lots of help from dedicated, talented people.  Since 2011 I've not had as much help, and thus resources that we built in the 2000s are now only available as archives.

For the past 10 years I’ve been trying to build a team of people that will help me think through these topics and will help generate the resources and public will needed to make more and better non-school tutor/mentor programs available.

I recently had a conversation with a supporter who said "I've suggestions for how you could do this better."   I responded, are you willing to do the work to put your suggestions into action?  

That's my invitation.  Create your own blog and/or video library.  Re-write my blogs. Create new versions of my videos.  Rebuild my websites.  Create new versions of the Tutor/Mentor Connection in communities across the country.

Connect them to each other,  using libraries like I've created, so that instead of competing, you're trying to help each other do more and more each year to help the kids in your community.

Connect with me on social media and ask me to ZOOM with you.  Join my forum on NING and ask me to help you.  

And, if you're able, visit this page and make a contribution to help me fund this work for the next few years so I'm here and able to help you and others. 

Thanks for reading.  Enjoy this Labor Day.