Unleashing Influence of Business School Students

On LinkedIn I'm following a series of posts by Brad Fulton, of Indiana University, showing how they are "Building a comprehensive data analytics platform that integrates information from millions of tax filings, grants and other sources related to philanthropic giving."

I introduced his work and provided links in this article about "Making Philanthropy Work Better".

More recently I've been following LinkedIn posts by Daniel Max Crowley of Penn State University, such as the one I show below. 

Dr. Crowley is challenging universities to rethink how they use their research to increase public impact.  I  introduced Dr. Fulton to Dr. Crowley this week, since getting more people to find and use the philanthropy research, can be part of the strategies Dr. Crowley advocates for.

This is something I've tried to influence for more than 25 years.  Find the graphic shown below in this article, titled "Leaders Needed to Solve Complex Problems". 

In that article I called on more strategic involvement from universities and shared a student-involvement strategy that I began framing in the late 1990s.  In 2006 a Net Impact Fellow from the University of Chicago formalized it in a wiki article titled "Business School Connection".

Here's a paragraph summarizing the goal.

The Business School Connection is an concept strategy created by the Tutor Mentor Connection in the mid 1990s. Its goal is to create a link between business schools and tutor mentor organizations around the nation where business schools and their students use the skills they are learning in an on-going effort to increase visibility and raise operating dollars and volunteers to support volunteer-based tutor/mentor programs in the city where a business school is located, and in other parts of the country. The T/MC believes that MBA students have unique ways of thinking and valuable connections that can be used to channel monetary and in-kind resources to tutor mentor organizations.

Below is a graphic showing the year-round public awareness and network-building strategy that I began in 1993 and still follow in 2026.  

Imagine what might happen if students from business schools, marketing and communications classes and journalism schools were running campaigns every year that use data like what Brad Fulton is collecting, to draw attention and resources to every high poverty zip code in the country. Imagine this being a competition between high profile universities, to see who does it better.

If the work done in one year, by one team of students, is saved on a website at the university, all teams could learn from what was done in the past in an on-going effort to do better in the future.  Sharing this resource across many universities would accelerate the innovations and the impact of this program on the well-being of the community surrounding the university.

Imagine the slices of the leadership pie in the upper left side of this graphic being different business schools, who each focus on building more support for youth-serving programs in their communities. See it in this article. 

Last fall and this spring students from an Information Visualization MOOC at Indiana University created dashboards to show participation in the 1994 to 2015 May and November Tutor/Mentor Leadership and Networking Conferences that I hosted in Chicago.  This was a follow up to earlier work done in 2014. They showed how data can be collected from registration forms and/or surveys then uploaded into visualization tools like Kumu.io, Gephi and Tableau.  Below is one example.

You can read about the IVMOOC work in articles found here and here.

Now imagine a team of students using the tools the IVMOOC teams have created to identify all of the departments within a university ecosystem that focus on a common issue, which could be very narrow, like tutoring, or much broader, like education and youth development.

Connecting those already doing this work is a step toward identifying those who are not yet involved.  I suspect not many business schools would show up on the first round of surveys if the goal was to find programs aimed at expanding the networks of kids living in areas of concentrated poverty.

Last month this blog recorded 519,578 page views.  That's a huge increase over previous months. I'm not sure what is driving this, but I hope it continues and that it leads to people from more places looking at the ideas I'm sharing.  Maybe one will be someone like Mackenzie Scott, who's looking for new ways to make a lasting impact with their wealth.  

Funding a Tutor/Mentor Connection with Business School Connection at one or more universities would be a great investment.

Thanks for reading.  Connect with me on LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, BlueSky and/or Mastodon.  See links on this page.

I depend on contributions from a small group of supporters to fund the work I'm doing.  Visit this page if you'd like to help.

Traffic up on this blog and Tutor/Mentor website

I've been writing this blog since April 2005 and look monthly at the "stats".  Below is the report through June 3, 2026.  Look at how many people visited the site in May.... 518,578!  That's the largest single month ever!

Then visit the home page of www.tutormentorexchange.net and look at the "Who's Online since 7-7-25" box in the upper right side of the home page.

That shows 2,580,506 guests since July 7, 2025.  This has averaged around 250,000 visits a month since last July when the feature was added to the website.

I don't get a lot of comments on the blog so don't know who, or how many, are using the ideas to help volunteer-based tutor, mentor and learning programs grow in the Chicago region or in other cities and states.  I don't know what sparked the huge increase of visits in May 2026.  

I even recorded a large number of views of my visual essays on Scribd.com last month.  Over 15,000!

Below is a graphic that I've used for many years.  The big circle represents all the information that I host on my website and share in my blog articles. The map of Chicago emphasizes my goal of helping long-term volunteer-based tutor/mentor programs reach k-12 youth in every high poverty neighborhood.

The YOU represents anyone who looks at the information I'm sharing, then shares it with their own network.  That can be as simple as just reposting an article.  It can be more sophisticated, by how someone creates their own version of an article or visual essay, then shares it on their own social media platforms.  

As more people take this role, it leads more people to information they can use to build and sustain programs that help K-12 kids through school and into jobs and careers, free of the challenges facing those who live in areas of concentrated poverty.

I'll turn 80 this December. I hope. My lung doctor told me this week that my lung disease is not getting better and that I should be planning for end-of-life activities.  He did not say this was "imminent". But, it was part of the conversation. 

That just means it is more important than ever that a donor steps forward to provide funds that motivate a university to create an on-campus Tutor/Mentor Connection, with my archives, websites, blogs, etc. hosted by them and their students/alumni.  Here's one article where I've extended that invitation. 

If you are the YOU in the graphic shown above, who can you share this with who has the money/influence to motivate one, or many, universities to create an on-campus Tutor/Mentor Connection?  

I don't know how many years I have left.  Even without a progressive lung disease, none of us really knows when our time has ended.  In the meantime, I'll keep posting and keep looking for a way to preserve my 50 year history so others can learn from it after I'm gone.

Please share my posts and connect with me on LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, BlueSky, Twitter and/or Mastodon.

And, if you're able, please visit this page and make a contribution to help me pay the bills while I'm still here!

Thank you!