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.

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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.