While I've tagged over 130 article on this blog with #planning, probably most of the one-thousand plus articles posted here since 2005 focus on the planning needed to help great, on-going, mentor-rich programs reach K-12 youth in all areas of persistent poverty.
I show planning steps and information mapping below. Do you have visualizations like these to show your problem-solving process?
This concept map highlights steps in an on-going planning process which aims to influence what resource providers, businesses and policy-makers do, not just what kids, educators, program leaders and parents do. click here to open
Below is another version of this planning process. click here to open
On both concept maps you'll see geographic maps used at the beginning of the planning process. Unless you define what places you want to help, using a map, you could get a lot of people together, spend a lot of money, and still miss a lot of the places that need help the most.
On both concept maps I show a next step, of gathering available information about the problem, who's already working to solve it, who should be involved in planning and action steps, etc.
Using that information the Tutor/Mentor Connection (1993-present) began creating maps to show locations of non school, volunteer-based tutoring and/or mentoring programs in 1993 and to follow media stories about shootings, gangs, or poorly performing schools, with map stories that talked about the availability (or lack) of tutor/mentor programs in the area surrounding the incident.My goal has been that maps and the library of programs and research be used by leaders in business, government, colleges, hospitals, faith groups and government to fill high poverty neighborhoods with a wide range of youth development and workforce development based tutor and mentor programs.
(Read more in this article)
My goal has been to expand the information planners had available when developing new solutions to persistent problems. A research team could dig into my library and the websites I point to when starting a planning process. Ideally they already would have spent many hours learning what's in the library, so when a grant opportunity or new policy initiative is being discussed, they already know where they can find large amounts of information.
I added two new resources to the research section of the library today. Below is a view of one page from an extensive "Poverty & Wealth Inequality" project created by Gene Bellinger, a systems thinking pro who I've learned from for more than a dozen years. You can see his influence in the planning map shown at the top of this article.
Open this link to start your journey. Gene has used AI to create a series of stories and relationship maps, that show a not-to-distant future where the rich and powerful have taken full control. His stories show how people have built a resistance that ultimately overthrows that government and replaces it with one more fully committed to the welfare of all people and the planet. Open the link to start reading the stories and open more and more pages.
You won't see the interactive graphic shown above until you open the html file that Gene points to in the upper right of the page. If you open that file you'll find an interactive map. That means you can zoom in to look more closely at different elements. You can click on nodes to read the text. You can create and share your own versions, as I'm doing.
Each link on this page opens to a story, with additional maps. As my #CLMOOC friend Terry Elliot would say, it's like "going down a rabbit hole" of learning. You just keep going deeper and deeper.
All of this is just part of the first stage of a planning process. It's really on-going because problem solving is cyclical. As you solve the first problem you face new problems, which require new information, and new people and resources. Furthermore, this process is at different stages in thousands of places where people are trying to solve the same problem. If information showing what each group is doing is available in web libraries, planners should be able to learn from each other, and not be constantly "reinventing-the-wheel".
One of your challenges will be to build this network, then sustain and expand it over many years. That's Step 1 in the concept map shown below.
If the process works, it leads to Step 4, where planners find lists of organizations to support, or tools to fill voids where new organizations are needed. The public awareness generated in Step 2 aims to motivate people to volunteer time, talent and dollars supporting youth serving programs in the area planners are focused. In my case, that's been the Chicago region since 1993. My list of tutor/mentor programs can be found here.
I've never had much money for any of this, particularly Steps 2 and 3. So I've focused on motivating other people to share the message and help build understanding. It's what faith leaders have done for over 2000 years.
Is anyone doing this?
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1 comment:
Thank for sharing the work of Gene Bellinger. I'll take a look.
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