Honor their sacrifices. Keep fighting.

Monday is Memorial Day.  I've posted articles like these, almost every year since starting this blog in 2005. They all have a similar message.  "Honor the sacrifices of those who served by giving your time, talent, dollars and votes to create systems of hope and opportunity for youth living in areas of highly concentrated poverty."

In 2013 Kyungryul Kim, an intern from South Korea, created this video, showing steps needed to fight this war.  It was based on a blog article I wrote earlier.

 

I point to more than 150 Chicago area youth-serving programs in lists I have built since the early 1990s. My goal has been to help each program attract more consistent attention and a better flow of needed operating resources.   

The "War on Poverty" video highlights each of the steps shown on this graphic.

Every city and state needs a planning process like this. I don't think I've ever seen one from any Mayor of Chicago.  That's one reason we're still fighting this war.  If leaders in your community have created a visual like this to show their process, please share it.

I follow most of Chicago's volunteer-based tutor, mentor and learning organizations on their social media channels, such as LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram.  Very few post on BlueSky, Threads or Mastodon.  I don't use Tic Toc, so don't know how frequently Chicago youth-serving programs are posting there.

That means I'm able to see posts by leaders of many different tutor/mentor programs.  Many are eloquent in making the case for why volunteer-based tutor/mentor programs are needed.   

A couple of weeks ago Jeffrey Beckham, Jr,. CEO of Chicago Scholars, wrote this article, titled "The Power of Mirrors and Windows".   In it he wrote, 

"Someone else asked me recently, how do you not burn out doing this work? 

 The answer is the young people. They keep you honest. 

 Every single scholar I meet reminds me why it matters. You don’t burn out when you stay close to the people you are doing it for. You burn out when you get too far away from them, and it starts feeling like strategy instead of people."

I feel the same way.

My passion for the Tutor/Mentor Connection, which I've led since 2011 through Tutor/Mentor Institute, LLC, comes from my interactions with students and volunteers of the Montgomery Ward-Cabrini Green Tutoring Program, which I led from 1975 to 1992 and Cabrini Connections, which I formed in late 1992 and led until mid 2011.  

Read Jeffrey's article, and follow the posts by other tutor, mentor and learning programs.  As we honor those who gave the ultimate sacrifice to preserve our country's freedom, these show that the war is not over.  There's much you can do to help youth and families living in areas of concentrated poverty.

There's much you can do to stop the damage being done to the United States of America by the current President and his supporters.  

One thing you can do is keep reading my blog articles, then share your interpretations of them with your own network, the way Kyungryul Kim did in 2013.

Many voices will be needed, for many years.

Have a safe holiday.  

I depend on contributions from a small group of donors to keep doing this work. If you can help, visit this page. 

Locating places with persistent poverty

My Twitter feed brought a new report to my attention this week. It's titled "Persistently poor, left-behind and chronically disconnected" and was written by Kenan Fikri who I've been following for a while.  (I'll use Persistent Poverty to refer to this report in the rest of this article.)

The map below was what caught my attention.  It shows areas of concentrated poverty in six Ohio cities.

I wrote about this on the Mapping For Justice blog a few days ago. You can read that article here. 

Today I zoomed into the interactive map shared on the Economic Innovation Group website to look more closely at different parts of the country where some of my #CLMOOC educator friends live. 

This map shows Massachusetts, Connecticut and Rhode Island.

This map shows Kentucky and Tennessee

This map shows Washington State

This map shows Chicago, Milwaukee and the area surrounding Lake Michigan. 

This map shows Washington, DC and Baltimore

What these maps show is that the places of concentrated, persistent poverty, are not everywhere. They are small parts of big cities like Chicago, or big states.  The mapping  platform is interactive, so you can look at other places and you can zoom in to the neighborhood level.  

Below is a screen shot showing the abstract describing the research where I found these maps.  

The abstract shows a focus on social networks and social capital and says "these problems tend not to resolve themselves naturally".

2-24-2026 update - article shows "Persistent poverty varies massively across U.S. regions" - click here

I've used maps since 1994 to try to draw attention and resources to high poverty areas of Chicago to help volunteer-based tutor, mentor and learning programs grow and stay connected to youth and volunteers for many years.

Below are two images that illustrate this commitment:

The first is the front page of the 1995 Chicago Tutor/Mentor Programs Directory.  The map's shaded areas are places of concentrated, persistent poverty.  In the Directory, I listed volunteer-based tutor, mentor and learning programs and provide contact information so parents, volunteers, donors, media, educators and social workers can find them.  View PDF of the Directory.

The second is my Total Quality Mentoring graphic.  This shows the goal of connecting youth living in high poverty areas with volunteers from different places and backgrounds, as mentors, tutors, activity organizers, friends and coaches.  

View this PDF to see my vision of leaders from different industries using their own time and talent to mobilize volunteers and donors to support tutor/mentor programs in different high poverty areas of Chicago. 

The role of intermediaries.  The graphic below shows the role the Tutor/Mentor Connection has taken since forming in 1993, and that the Tutor/Mentor Institute, LLC has continued to support since forming in 2011.

Read articles posted on this website since 2005 and the Mapping for Justice blog since 2008, and the www.tutormentorexchange.net site since 1999, and you'll see the information I've aggregated and shared to support efforts to help build and sustain mentor-rich programs in all high poverty areas of Chicago and other places.

The maps showing persistent poverty in America show other places where an information-based intermediary like the Tutor/Mentor Connection is needed.  My graphics and articles show the active role the intermediary needs to take to draw users to this information, help them understand it, and help them apply it to bring volunteers and dollars to every youth serving program in every high poverty place, for many years.

Colleges and universities in every city and state could create tutor/mentor connection research programs do duplicate the work I've piloted since 1993.  This PDF shows this goal.  All it takes is for one, or two, wealthy alumni to provide the money to pay for such a program, along with a dedicated faculty member who wants to lead this for the next 30 years or more. 

I've shared this story for many years. Every city needs people doing the same, for as long, and reaching more people.  Learn from my example. Borrow from my files Create your own libraries, blog articles and visual essays. 

Or, accept that we'll still have areas of persistent poverty 30 years from now.

You can find me on social media at Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Mastodon and more places. Find links here. 

At the right is a 1994 story from the Chicago SunTimes, showing how I traded my advertising job at the Montgomery Ward corporation to lead a tutor/mentor program.  The teen in the photo is now the mother of two college age boys, holds at least one MBA, and is a successful business woman.  That was our goal when we launched our program.

That can be the future for many kids living in high poverty areas, if you'll help organized, on-going, tutor/mentor programs reach them.

Do you value what I'm writing? Make a small contribution to help Fund the Tutor/Mentor Institute,  LLC. visit this page. 

Borrow ideas from my visualizations

I've been updating my visual essays for the past two months and now include statements calling on other cities to adopt the strategies I've piloted since 1993 in Chicago. 

Below is a "War on Poverty" essay, which shows planning steps needed to assure that every K-12 youth living in a high poverty area has access to well-organized, mentor-rich, non-school, tutor, mentor and learning programs.

Planning Cycle - War on Po... by Daniel F. Bassill

Below is one of the slides from this presentation.

In my blog articles, social media posts, and essays I encourage leaders from Chicago and other places to share these presentations and use maps the way I demonstrate, to focus attention and resources on areas with high poverty and to do the planning necessary to fill every poverty area with high quality, long-term, tutor, mentor and learning programs.  Voters should reward political leaders who do this.

Another presentation uses the Total Quality Mentoring graphic that I created in the 1990s to show donors how the tutor/mentor program I was leading connected inner-city teens to a wide range of workplace adults and learning opportunities.

Every spoke on the wheel of this graphic could represent youth and adult leaders who were sharing this blog article with people in their work, family, religious, alumni and social networks.

I created the essay below to explain this Total Quality Mentoring idea.

Total Quality Mentoring (TQ... by Daniel F. Bassill

In many of my updates I've added the map shown below, which shows that many cities in the USA have areas of concentrated poverty.  These are places that could be using my archives to build their own Tutor/Mentor Connection-type strategies.  

You can view this map and find a link to the article if you visit this MappingforJustice page. 

You can find links to almost all of my PDF essays on this page.  

I'd love to find posts on social media showing teachers, leaders, students, etc. sharing these ideas with people they know.  You can find me on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and Mastodon (see links here).

I want to thank Joanne Telser-Frère of  Literacy Chicago, for reading my monthly newsletter, then sending me information about programs having moved to new locations, so I could update my map showing volunteer based youth tutor, mentor programs in the Chicago region.  I can't keep my information up-to-date without such help.

Thanks for reading. Please share.  Furthermore, if you can help fund the Tutor/Mentor Institute, LLC please visit this page.

 

Battle Plan for War on Poverty

I attended a STEM Education Summit in the Chicago area on Friday, hosted at Oak Park/River Forest High School. While the speakers at this Summit were not talking about the high school drop out crisis, which I've written about in past articles, they were talking about a workforce crisis that will result from baby-boomers retiring and not enough young people preparing to go into STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) related careers.

Over the past 18 years I've created a variety of graphics to illustrate this problem. The one below shows that the "pipeline to careers" is not working well enough to reach kids at an early age and provide a wide range of mentoring and learning supports that would result in a larger number finishing high school and post high school education and entering careers in STEM or any other avocation they choose.



In the conferences I go to and web sites I browse I don't see many who are using maps and charts and thinking about this problem the way generals and CEOs think about the distribution channels and logistics needed to win military wars, or business wars.

A few years ago I created a graphic that illustrates the planning that would need to take place to enable more and better mentor-rich programs to be in neighborhoods where kids don't have an effective entry point into the "pipeline to careers" nor to that have enough effective supports along the way. As a result, we're losing kids to street violence, bad health, poor nutrition, and lack of preparation for adult jobs and responsibilities.

I've been trying to think of a way to communicate this idea in an article that I could post on the Tutor/Mentor Institute, LLC web site or in the collection I've been building on Scribd.com.

If you look at this chart you'll see how I compare the planning process needed to support military forces in many places to that needed to make tutor/mentor programs available in many places. While many might want to create "pilots" or "demonstration projects" we can't really afford not to have some sort of learning support reaching K-12 kids in all of the high poverty areas of Chicago with intense forms of learning support and mentoring, while also providing needed supports to kids in all other neighborhoods who may need more inspiration and support to succeed in school and/or choose STEM careers.

Maps can help us focus our attention on specific parts of a problem. Out of all the people talking about education reform, perhaps some can focus just on high poverty neighborhoods, while others can focus on non-poverty areas. If we can segment our focus then we're talking about the same problems and able to converge on better solutions than if we have a mixed bag of discussion where the words are the same but the meanings are different, depending on what the economic and community support is for the kids you're talking about.

So, if we have a team focused on helping kids born in poverty be starting STEM careers in 20-25 years, the first step is to be building a library of information and ideas that the group can use to innovate new solutions that might generate more consistent support, and a better distribution of resources in more places.

To reach youth at every age level in more places with age-appropriate mentoring and learning a huge range of programs will be needed, meaning the planners need to be thinking of ways to recruit, train and equip thousands of program organizers, leaders, tutors, mentors, coaches, etc.

Imagine the logistics needed to put military forces all over the world and keep them supplied with food, weapons, ammunition, medicine, etc. The army of teachers, tutors, mentors and leaders needed to reach kids in every poverty neighborhood of the Chicago region requires the same type of on-going support.

The War in Iraq lasted over 8 years. World War II lasted 4 years. WalMart has been growing for more than 40 years! Imagine the thinking that is being done some place in the headquarters of the military and at companies like Wal Mart that enables them to constantly recruit and train new talent to take the place of those who retire, resign or are lost in combat. We need this same type of thinking preparing young people for STEM careers, and for careers leading programs that prepare young people for these careers!

We've spent billions of dollars fighting wars. Big business spends billions of dollars on their human resource development so they have well-trained people in the jobs that need to be filled in order for the companies to be successful. We need people who are innovating ways to generate revenue to support this massive infrastructure of youth development, mentoring and tutoring programs in just the same way.

It all comes down to how well you can build and sustain public attention, interest and support for the war effort. Companies spend millions of dollars on advertising and public relations to maintain support for their business strategies and to attract customers to their products and services. While there are events like National Mentoring Month, National Volunteer Week, Make A Difference Day, Black History Month, etc. where is the coordination and planning needed to turn these into an orchestra of events needed to build long-term public support for this battle plan to end poverty by help more kids through school and into 21st century jobs and careers?

I have been trying to map these ideas using the types of graphics I've used in this article, and using on-line platforms like this Debategraph tool.

I'm not sure how clearly I've communicated this idea. I invite others to do their own version of this story. However, while I may not be communicating as clearly as I'd like, I've spent more years thinking about this from a systems perspective than many others in this country. I've written more than 1000 articles on this blog alone, and created numerous illustrated essays posted on the Tutor/Mentor Institute, LLC site and in many other places.

If you're trying to develop a strategy to mentor kids to jobs and careers, I'd like to encourage you to read some of the articles I've written. I also encourage you to hire me to help you understand these ideas. I can come to you and talk about any of the articles on this blog, or that I've posted in the Tutor/Mentor Institute library or the Scribd.com library.

If you've been fortunate to amass great wealth and you want to leave a legacy, why not put your name on the Tutor/Mentor Institute, LLC or bring the Institute to alma mater where it can be integrated into the work a university does to prepare young people for adult roles.

If you'd like to connect, just post a comment or meet me on Twitter or Facebook.