25 years later. Funding still major concern.

My LinkedIn feed includes a daily helping of posts by Chicago area tutor/mentor programs and by consultants and other intermediaries who share ideas for helping nonprofit organizations attract and retain donors.  

Raising money has always been a challenge for myself and most other small and mid-size nonprofit organizations.  The current US Federal Government is compounding this challenge.  

This prompted me to look at some of the articles I wrote about this in past years.  Below is text from a 2009 article

....begin 2009....

This morning I attended a Literacy Roundtable, hosted by Jeanne Myers, Executive Director of Working in the Schools (WITS). The aim was to encourage programs to get to know each other, identify common challenges, then work in collaboration to overcome those challenges.

In attendance were many programs listed in the Chicago Programs Library and who participate in Tutor/Mentor Conferences. There were also a few programs that I was not familiar with, since they focus on adult literacy, or deliver their services primarily in schools.

The roster included

Literacy Works
Bookworm Angels
Jumpstart Program at DePaul
Howard Area Community Center*
Reading in Motion*
WITS*
826CHI*
East Village Youth Program*
Literacy Volunteers of Illinois*
Literature for All of Us*
Cabrini Connections
Chicago Lights*
Neighborhood Writing Alliance
Youth Guidance*

*in Chicago Program Links library

Everyone was asked to share what they do and identify challenges. A majority listed lack of funding, and “too much to do with limited staff” as the primary challenge. Those working with Chicago Public Schools noted how difficult it was to get response from the Central Office and Administrators, and how it was more productive to work directly with teachers.

A few shared frustration about how donors expectations were not aligned with the long-term nature of the tutoring/mentoring programs many of us lead. A few talked about how we “Try to sneak literacy and learning into” our programs and “trick kids to be excited” about learning. One leader said we’re “inching toward things where they (donors) expect very measurable fireworks.”

Everyone agreed that this type of networking was valuable, and WITS suggested such events be held quarterly. I urged them to consider holding their November and May meetings within the Tutor/Mentor Conference structure, rather than creating a separate set of meetings at different places. The goal of the conference is not just to bring people together, but to build public awareness that draws volunteers and donors to tutor/mentor programs all over the city. As programs see this in their self-interest, we hope more will become strategically involved with the conference and activities around the conference that increase visibility for tutor/mentor programs.

One leader suggested creating a new web site with listings and links for all of the literacy programs in Chicago. I encouraged them to first see if they were listed in the T/MC library, and were using it for collaboration, before they create a new web site that someone would need to manage on a regular basis to keep the data up-to-date as we do at the T/MC.

One leader noted that for people to be motivated to keep coming to meeting like this the group would need to “expand the resource pie” so that everyone would get some tangible funding relief as a result of their participation.

I’ve posted a graphic that is in one of the presentations on the Tutor/Mentor Institute web site. It illustrates the many funding choices the people and organizations make. Our goal is that every business and foundation in the Chicago region (and the country) has a slice of their donation pie dedicated to volunteer-based tutor/mentor programs like the ones many of us lead, and that they are taking leadership roles that encourage employees, retirees and customers to provide time, talent and dollars to support programs within the tutor/mentor category.

I ended my comments by urging each program to use their own communications ability to share information about this meeting, and to help educate donors on why they should fund volunteer-based tutor/mentor programs. Imagine if 25 or 50 tutor/mentor programs in Chicago were using blogs, Facebook, Ning and other forums with the same purpose and vision that I write this blog.

We talked about meeting again and I encouraged leaders to use the Internet to connect with each other. I think face-to-face meetings are important, but it's difficult to get all of the right people into a set of on-going meetings. With the Internet, anyone can be part of the meeting, regardless of where they are in the world.

I believe we have a lot of room to grow in this area. I think many of the non-profit tutor/mentor program leaders in Chicago, and many of the business and foundation leaders we want to connect with, are not actively using the internet for learning, collaboration and capacity building. I say that just because I don't find many forums where there is active participation of other tutor/mentor programs from Chicago, or of those who would benefit if such programs were having a greater impact in helping kids through school and into jobs.

This is a challenge to all of us. What good is all of this information if high level city, state and national leaders are not spending a few hours each week browsing web sites to learn directly from the ideas that are available to them. Having someone on your staff tell you about what they read on a web site is not the same thing as looking at that information with your own eyeballs.

If we want kids to learn to use this resource, we need to find ways that our adults, and older generation of leaders, are finding time to explore it themselves.

If you attended today’s meeting, or share the same concerns, why not write about it on a blog, or on Facebook. Why not join in on-line discussions to share more about what you do, and what you feel you and others can do to increase the size of the pie, so all of us have the resources needed to help kids succeed in school and in life.

If you're already doing this, please share your link and we'll try to give you attention from our own blog and web site, just as I have by putting links to programs in this blog.

---- end 2009 article ----

I mentioned the Tutor/Mentor Leadership and Networking Conferences in this post and said most of those at that meeting probably have attended one, or more, conferences.  In Nov. 2025 a team of students from Indiana University created an interactive Kumu.io presentation that enables you to look at conferences held each year and see who attended.  Below is a view of a 2000 conference showing the Working In the Schools program.

Below is a view of the 2009 conferences. You'll find WITS and Chicago Lights among the organizations who attended both conferences that year.

The analysis of these conferences show that we were successful in bringing programs together to learn from each other.  It also shows that we were not successful in bringing business, professional groups and donors into the same space.  You can open the presentation and look for your own organization. click here

The challenges of raising money where not new, even in 2009.  During the conferences held in the early 2000s a volunteer hosted surveys asking programs what the greatest challenges were. You can view a summary of comments in this visual essay.

People and resources were the top two concerns.  Look on page 9 and 10 for definitions of what they meant by saying "people" and "resources".  That was true then. It was true in 2009. It's true in 2026.

I've posted more than 120 articles on this blog since 2005 that have a primary focus on philanthropy.  I pointed to these articles at each conference held between 2005 and 2015 and have continued to point to them via social media and my email newsletter in the years since then.

I included the above graphic in a January 2025 article, reinforcing the need for NPOs to work together to educate donors and expand the funding pie, then compete for a larger slice. 

There's too much information and too little time to read even a small part of it. That's why I keep seeking partners in high schools and universities who might use my blog articles, website and archives as content for on-going learning aimed at building a generation of nonprofit leaders who are constantly learning and looking for ways to connect with others, along with a ecosystem of alumni who have learned the value of youth-serving programs and use on-line libraries like mine to find programs that they can support.

Getting my articles in front of more readers is the first challenge. So while I thank you for reading this, I urge you to share it with others. 

Then, connect with me on social media. You can find links to various platforms on this page.

Finally, if you're able, please visit this page and make a small contribution to help me pay the bills!

Network Building - Can you Do this, Too?

I created this graphic many years ago to visualize the idea of "network building" where the ideas I share on my blogs, website and email newsletter are shared by others, and graduadally reach people throughout the world. 

When we created the Tutor/Mentor Connection in 1993 we had no money. There were just seven volunteers, and our primary focus was building a new youth tutor/mentor program that would serve teens living in the Cabrini-Green neighborhood of Chicago.  However, we recognized that while one more small program might offer life-changing opportunities for a few kids, it would not change the future for the 200,000+ kids living in poverty areas of Chicago.  That's why we created the Tutor/Mentor Connection.

While we raised money every year, we never had much for advertising and public awareness, so our strategies were intended to recruit "disciples" who would help spread our messages.   

The graphic above is one visualization of this idea. The one below is another.  On the world's largest ping pong ball table, every time I post an idea, it spreads rapidly, if others share it with their own networks. 

Below are two recent examples of people taking this role on Twitter.

Arne Duncan's quote comes to mind, "We know what to do!",whenever I read Dan Bassill. Scaling up, evidence-based ideas that work from visionaries like Dan is something I'm interested in helping make happen. https://t.co/VcWJyLNfuI

— brian banks (@Brian_Banks) October 16, 2022

Here's a second

Please read these articles, advice, map analysis, etc. Really several decades of work to bring people together with kids and their families. Such wonderful ideas that are quite valuable today. Thanks @tutormentorteam Daniel Bassill. #NetworkBuilder #Tutor #Mentor https://t.co/HtEBZGJCBj

— n2teaching (@n2teaching) September 26, 2022

Others have been doing this for several years.  I created the concept map below to point to blog articles by others, which point to the strategies I've been sharing.

Between 2004 and 2015 interns working with me in Chicago were encouraged to read my blog articles and then create their own interpretations.  The concept map below points to work they did. 

One of our earliest interns was from Hong Kong.  He created this blog in 2006 and I've updated it annually since then.  Browse through the articles to meet interns and see the work they did.  A page like this could be created on the website of any high school or college in the country, showing work their own students are doing to bring people to these ideas and to help youth in their own communities.

If you have a page like this, please share it. 

This graphic visualizes the goal of all of this network building.  Groups of people from every sector should be using these ideas and the research links I share in the Tutor/Mentor Library to determine where kids need more extra help, why they need that help, what others are doing in different places to provide needed help, and ways they can apply those ideas to help kids living in high poverty areas of their own communities.

This should have been happening since the late 1990s when the Internet became a platform to connect people and ideas.  

Thanks for reading. I hope you're inspired to share this blog, just like Brian and others have been doing. Use the ideas in your own company, foundation, political office.  I'd be happy to help you.

Connect with me on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, or Instagram.  See links here.

If you can help Fund the Tutor/Mentor Institute, LLC please click this link and use PayPal to send your help. 

After Covid19: Visions for the Future

Have you ever had an experience, where you just randomly dropped into a conversation, and found it to be one of the best you've had in a long time? It happened to me on Wednesday, April 15. I knew that Valerie Leonard was hosting a ZOOM conversation at 2pm that day, and recognized some of the guests, but I was not certain I'd have time to join in. Then at 1:45 pm my day opened, and I went to Facebook, found the link, and you can watch the video to see what we talked about.  Here's the recording.

This was one of the best one hours that I have spent on-line in a long time. Let me introduce you to the participants.

click to enlarge

Oscar Rivero, Ronan Perennes and Marcela Calderon are students in a marketing class at Roosevelt University in Chicago, which is led by Valerie F. Leonard, who also is the founder of a consulting platform called Non-Profit Utopia.

Oscar is from Mexico and Ronan is from France (and was in Paris while talking with us in the ZOOM meeting.) Marcella is from Downers Grove, a Chicago suburb.  If I get a link to the class blog I'll post it here in a few days.

click to enlarge

To the right is a screen shot showing other participants. Valerie had invited Shelby Parchman, founder of InUrban Strategies, LLC and Xavier Ramey, CEO of Justice Informed, LLC., to be guest speakers, then posted the invitation for others to join in.  Mike Trout, founder of the YMEN Chicago youth organization in the North Lawndale community on Chicago's West side joined in, as did Will Chatman, Program Manager for YMEN.  JP Paulus of DoGooder Consulting also participated, along with myself.

Mike introduces Dan Bassill

The first part of the meeting was introductions, and when it came to my turn, my mic was not working.  After a short silence, Mike Trout spoke up, saying "I could almost speak for Dan", and he did. Open the image at the left or listen to the video to see Mike's intro of me.

I first met Mike in the early 1990s when he was forming YMEN. In the late 1990s we had a conversation where he said "At first, I did not trust what you were saying, but after seeing you repeat your message over, and over, I really believe you."  You can see that from his introduction of me. Thank you Mike!

During the introductions each of Valerie's students told a bit about who they are, where they came from and how they were all connected through the soccer program at Roosevelt, where Oscar is head coach, and through a youth soccer program in Pilsen, where all three are involved.

Xavier Ramey - TED Talk

I had heard Xavier Ramey speak at several events in the past couple of years, and you can get to know him better in this TED talk. 

He led off his part of the ZOOM meeting saying “The situation we're in now is a moment of harvest, and of planting, as well. We're harvesting what we planted together before, such as shadowy social safety net.

What excites me is that “so many people who have been alarm sounders; seeing now how they are organizing, and asking,  What can our economy look like?”

After the introductions Valerie led the group into a conversation about socialism, pointing to comments Oscar had made during class a few weeks previous.

The next 30 minutes focus on student and panel member thoughts on this topic.

Oscar said,   “A lot of people stigmatize that word, Socialism, and confuse it with Communism. They entail different systems.

It's about balance. What capitalism could do with some socialist ideas that people have."   We need to revisit our ideologies and come up with ideas better than we had."

Marcella said, “For the most part if you already didn't start ahead, then you will never get ahead.  It's important for people who recognize that things can be done differently and that the only option isn’t to keep doing things the same,  is to be morphing that and sharing it with people who don't want to believe that's the case."

Ronan said, “In France, much different than what's happening in United States, because we're already a much more socialist country"


Since my mic did not work I was typing my comments into the chat box on ZOOM. Valerie read this post:

“I'd love to hear student thoughts of how marketing tactics could be applied to building public will needed to remove the stigma of socialism.”

Xavier and Mike focused on the idea of "American Individualism".

Xavier led of with:   At the core of this is the question of American individualism.  What we're being pressed on right now with Covid19, is the reality of our community commitments to one another, meaning public policy, government, social sector programming, and these types of things, the “community” stuff, the “not my personal family, not my personal friends, the what we have together if we commit to one another, has shown that it has a lot of gaps.   The value of our public relationships is so shallow that it can't provide for everyone."

Mike and Xavier have talked about this for many years. I asked Mike if Xavier had ben part of YMEN and he said "Xavier was a student in YMEN starting in 6th grade and stayed involved through his college graduation from DePaul University. A year after he graduated college he returned to YMEN to join our staff as the Director of Development and Marketing. Where he worked for 5 years before joining the team at the United Way of Metropolitan Chicago."

This long-term connection of youth with a site-based program is exactly what well-organized, consistently funded youth tutor/mentor programs can foster. It's what I've been working to help make happen across the Chicago region since forming the Tutor/Mentor Connection in 1993.

Mike added this to the ZOOM conversation: 

You got this American individualism which manifests on a bigger scale as American nationalism.

If we'd only learn from other countries who do things in a more communal and in a better way.

As you bring up models outside of the the American construct, you kind of go against the visceral reaction  that we have as Americans that say “no, no, we're the greatest country! How do you get people to acknowledge that other people out there are doing it better, and we need to learn from them.

There's a visceral reaction to word socialism. You can't market your way out of it. 

We need a different word, like the word justice, something for all."

ENOUGH - Educate yourself

I've only pulled a few snippets of conversation from this hour long session. There's much more.  I hope the students who participated, and others who view this, will take time to write and share their own reflection.  My #clmooc friend Terry Elliott, a college professor in Kentucky, has been trying to help me find a way to pull video clips from the master video. I've not been able to do that, but perhaps someone else who writes about this will succeed.

In the closing ZOOM meeting thoughts Shelby said, What are you doing now to do something post-covid? It's a good time to take a step back and think more clearly about what this world looks like, and how do you navigate that world?

We already have socialism. It's a bad word. But we already have it. Any time someone gets a check from the government, that's socialism.

Oscar added some closing thoughts when he said 

At the end of the day I think we have lost track of our humanity.

And like what true values of humanity should entail. Why are we in this world?

If you don't have a spirituality, forget religion, but just a spirituality of what a human being should be thinking of and what his purpose is in this world, then you start seeing people have that, like “its just about me and my community", and being close minded. 

The best people in the world have to look at how others do t hings.

I think there's much to think about from this conversation. I believe I and most working Americans have been brainwashed since birth, by nationalist and capitalist, self-interested parties.  Here's a few articles from my web library that might stretch your thinking.

* America's Hidden Philosophy - When Cold War philosophy tied rational choice theory to scientific method, it embedded the free-market mindset in US society

* America's Long (unaddressed) History of Class - click here

* 'Democracy In Chains' Traces The Rise Of American Libertarianism - click here

See work like this - here

The ENOUGH graphic and this "Is that ALL?" graphic were both created by interns who worked with me between 2006 and 2015. You can see these and other work on this page.

My role in the ZOOM meeting was to focus attention on the on-going communications and public education and engagement efforts that will be needed, by many people, reaching millions of other people, in order to create a world we want in the future.

The projects done by interns who worked with me are models of what other students (and adults) could be doing to share ideas and connect with others.  There is little costs involved. It just takes time.

The video above could be one of your first projects.

Thanks for reading. Let's find paths that take us forward together.

PS:  Yesterday as I was working on this article I received a call from Nathan Harris, who lives in Indianapolis. Nate started attending Tutor/Mentor Leadership and Networking Conferences around 2000 and that led to IUPUI tech department rebuilding the T/MC website in 2006 and hosting it through 2011. It's still hosted by the tech department head, but on a different server.  This is just another example of the long-term connections I keep trying to help grow from many youth programs in Chicago and around the country, like the YMEN program in North Lawndale.

Nate called to ask how I was and to tell me he and his wife Carrie were sending a small contribution.  If  you click this link, you can do that too.

Update 4-21-2020 - there will be many articles written on "what to do after Covid-19". Here's one from the Democracy Collaborative titled "Owning the Future: After COVID-19, a new era of community wealth building"

Tutor/Mentor Institute, LLC - A Social Capital Amplifier.

I've been invited to join an international group of 72 people, with the name of "Social Capital Amplifier".  The group is organized by Bert-Ola Bergstrand, who I first connected with on Facebook in 2011.

Here's a graphic I shared in a 2012 article showing my role as a network builder and "social capital amplifier". Bert shared it today in this post on Facebook and referred to it in a ZOOM webinar which was held today to begin to introduce the 72 people with each other.

I've used cMAPs to visualize ideas and strategies since 2005 and if you open this cMap, you'll see a timeline of actions I've led from 1990 to now, to help collect information and draw attention to it, so more people would be strategically involved in actions that build and sustain non-school, volunteer-based, tutor, mentor and learning programs in high poverty areas.....which are each learning from every other program in a continuous effort to influence the lives of kids, volunteers and others who need to be active participants in world events.

From 1990 through mid 2011 I found money and volunteers to help me do this work, through the structure of a 501-c-3 non profit organization. Since we started with no money, only a vision of a need to be filled, I was constantly raising money to pay the bills, including a salary for myself and the small paid staff helping me. I never had the money as I started any single year to fund all of the work I was committed to doing during that year. Thus, I constantly struggled to do what I was trying to do as well as it needed to be done.

I created the Tutor/Mentor Institute, LLC in 2011 to keep the Tutor/Mentor Connection available to Chicago and to help the idea spread to other cities and have had even less money and volunteer talent helping me. Yet, if you read articles on my blogs, view my Twitter posts, my Facebook and Linked in groups (find links here), you'll see that I'm working daily to build and maintain an information library and to draw attention (amplify) to the organizations and information in the library.

This is part of a 4-part strategy developed in 1993 and continued for the past 25 years. Visit this article to learn what's involved in each of the four steps.

Step two focuses on building public awareness, not for myself, but for all of those in the library!  This is amplification. It's work many need to be doing, not just myself.

View the other articles in this section that describe the four -part strategy. I've posted more than 1000 articles on this blog since 2005. They are all examples of this strategy in action.

If you do a Google search for "Tutor/Mentor Connection" then look at the "images" page, you'll see dozens of maps and graphics that I've created and used in my PDF presentations and blog articles to communicate ideas.

The graphic at the right is an example. It shows that if we want well organized youth tutor/mentor programs in all high poverty areas, we need to influence resource providers as well as service providers.

This is a concept I've shared with the Social Innovation communities I've connected with on Facebook. While it helps to connect all of the social innovators with each other, to share ideas, give encouragement and support, etc. what's needed is a way to influence (motivate) resource providers to join our conversations and build their own relationships with our members, understanding of the work we're trying to do, and commitment to help us in whatever ways they can with their time, talent and dollars.

In 2012 I did a network analysis map showing my Facebook friends network. You can view the pdf here.  The graphic at the right shows the people in my network that Bert-Ola was connected to, and how they are connected to each other.

I've been trying to find people to help me do the work I'm doing, on a consistent and on-going basis...with different levels of success in the 25 years since 1993.  In 1998 one of my tutor/mentor volunteers built my first web site for me. In 2005 the technology department of IUPUI rebuilt this site. It's still hosted by a tech volunteer in Indiana.

In 2004 an intern from India built this first searchable on-line program locator. Then, in 2007-8 another volunteer from India built two on-line platforms for me, including this interactive Chicago Tutor/Mentor Program Locator. Unfortunately, due to the financial meltdown starting in late 2007 I lost donors who supported this work and never could find money, or volunteers, to keep updating the platform and the list of programs.

While it still works, it's now more of a demonstration model than a really useful tool. 

Furthermore, it illustrates how important it is to find ways to bring "people who care" and "people who will invest time and talent" into our groups and communities so that some will offer to help you do those things which you're not really good at doing for yourself.

As the Social Capital Amplifier group develops over the coming year I'll be sharing Tweets, using a hashtag that has not yet been announced. I hope others will join in, add their own ideas, and amplify our messages, and help expand the network of support available to all of us.

Innovating at the World Wide Coffee Shop

Today in my Twitter feed my friend Simon Ensor, a university professor in France, who I met via the Connected Learning MOOC, #clmooc, posted this article, talking about how he was interacting with people throughout the world.  In the article was the TED talk that I'm showing below.  I hope you'll take time to view it.



In the TED talk the speaker, Steven Johnson,  talks about the English coffee house as a meeting place and spark for innovations that fed the Age of Enlightenment that stretched from 1715 to 1785. He finishes with a story about how a mid 1950s lunchtime conversation of two scientists led to GPS technology that we use every day to find a coffee shop near us.  In one part of the video he talks about how innovation is encouraged by allowing "those with hunches to connect with other people's hunches".

Don't know what I'm talking about? Watch the video. 

Simon's article talks about how difficult it is to engage in conversations with people who we pass in our daily lives and how he has been connecting with people like myself in on-going conversations via the Internet.

His article resonated with me, as many of them do.

I have a stack of business cards in front of me that I've collected over the past few months, and years, representing people I've met via various Chicago events. I've followed up with email and invited most to "have coffee and share ideas" with me, if they are interested.  Some do. Most don't. And even when we do meet, it's like a "one cup stand", not followed up with on-going connections that allow people to share "hunches" and connect with "other people's hunches" in ways that lead to new innovations in how we provide support to youth and families living in poverty, and how such on-going support might lesson the violence in our cities....while providing many other benefits.

I've been attending #ChiHackNight Tuesday evening sessions for a couple of years, and visit their Slack page daily to interact with participants.  Yesterday Isaw mention of this article from the SouthSideWeekly, which is reviewing a "Chicago at a Crossroads" event held recently to brainstorm solutions to violence in Chicago.

In it's critique of last week's event, the article said

The Times “live event,” coming nearly a year after the Memorial Day package, fell short in the same way its coverage did: its assemblage of voices offered no surprises and did little to push the fight against violence forward. After treating themselves to finger food in the venue lobby, its hundred-or-so well-dressed, mostly white attendees went home no closer to solving the gun violence crisis than they were when they arrived, and the perspectives presented on stage went more or less unchallenged. 

I've attended far too many events like this, with high profile talking heads on stage sharing ideas while several hundred in the audience listen. Maybe a few questions get asked. But there's no real interaction. And few event organizers create on-line spaces for participants and speakers to interact following the event.

The "It Takes a Village" concept map above shows my belief that people from all sectors need to be engaged in on-going efforts to reduce the poverty and isolation that feeds the violence we face in Chicago and other cities. In this article I expand on that idea.


The concept map at the right shows sections of the Tutor/Mentor Connection web library, which I started building even before I knew the Internet was a tool. I point to more than 2000 links, organized into four sections, with information and ideas anyone could use to build a deeper understanding of poverty, and to see work being done in some places that could be borrowed and applied in other places.  

Each link represents a group of people who I'd like to be meeting on an on-going basis in a "virtual" coffee shop of ideas and interaction.

When we think of the coffee house as a  meeting place, I feel there's just no realistic way that any of us can meet with more than a tiny fraction of people and ideas, if that's the only format available to us.  I've justified the time I spend on-line since 1998 by the fact that I can meet more people, and have deeper interactions over a period of years than is possible through face-to-face meetings.  We can not only connect with more people, but we can create gardens of ideas, such as our blogs and web libraries, that people from our immediate neighborhood and community, as well as people from around the world, can harvest for their own inspiration and application.

Unfortunately, the trade off is that I meet less often with people in Chicago who are part of this "village".

While I constantly say to people I've met in Chicago, "Let's do coffee and get to know each other", that just does not happen nearly as often as I'd like.  At the same time, while I have conversations with Simon in France, Terry in Kentucky, Kevin in Massachusetts and others from many other places, too few of the people working to help kids in Chicago are in these conversations.

It seems like Chicago is a hub for technology innovation but too many don't use this medium for networking, brainstorming and sharing ideas.  

I keep trying to change that. I'm inspired by people and ideas I keep meeting on-line.

Mapping a Week of Learning

In January 2016 I was introduced to on-line annotation by educators I've met over the past few years.  Here is one article that you can read to learn more about this.

I created this StoryMap to focus attention on some articles I read over the past 10 days and to show how I'm connecting, using annotation, with people from all over the world to build a deeper understanding and a network of people who support each other.



The link to the article is here.

2-23-2017 update - read and commented on article titled "Reading, Writing and Inquiry with Adolescents", using Hypothes.is. click here to read and join in.

Hoping for a big of luck

 I created this four leaf clover image a year ago and have had it posted on the Tutor/Mentor Connection web site since then. The four leaves point to the 4-part strategy that I've been following since developing it in 1993-1995 as a way to support the growth of volunteer-based tutor/mentor programs in Chicago and other cities. 

I added my own photo to the graphic a few weeks ago and posted it to my Facebook page.  

In both cases I pointed to this page, with a PayPal button that people could use to send me small contributions. 

So far a lot of people tell me how much impact I've had on their lives or how much they like what I'm doing, but too few are providing the financial support needed.  Part of this is because I'm no longer operating under a non profit structure (since 2011).

That's not by choice.  Since splitting from the non-profit organization that gave birth to the T/MC in 1993, I've not found a team of people who would fill the talent slots in the graphic below, with an  understanding and commitment to the work and goals of the Tutor/Mentor Connection. 

Without a small group of leaders, with some civic reach and the ability to raise money, forming a non-profit structure is not possible.

Thus, I continue to do this work, but with limited resources, but with daily hope that my good fortune and the work I do will bring people to me who share the goals and will help do the work.

In many blog articles, like this one, I include maps and articles, that illustrate that the work I've piloted in Chicago needs to be happening in every major city in the US, and in similar cities around the world.

Thus, the talent that supports this work, and the leaders who create a new non profit structure, could come from any city in the US. Or from around the world. Such people would be visionaries who understand the strategy, and don't want to start from scratch, or reinvent the wheel, but want to help build a process and tools that they could apply locally, at a fraction of the cost it would take to develop locally.

I've also written articles, like this one, showing that universities or teaching hospitals, in different cities could adopt the Tutor/Mentor Institute, and lead it as their own on-going strategy. 

Through social media I connect with hundreds of people every day. If anyone in the world does a Google search for the words "tutor mentor" they will find my sites on the first page.  Do the search. Look at the images. See how I communicate these ideas.

I created this graphic many years ago as a network-building worksheet. Each of us is surrounded by friends, family, coworkers and others who are interested in our work. We only need to tell them about it and some will offer support.  However, each of these people also has a network. If they tell of the work you do, that reached people you don't know. 

Ultimately, this reaches someone who has the power, influence, talent and/or wealth to make a huge difference in what you are doing.

It's not luck when these people find you. It's a result of the work that is done every day to nudge the network and to provide ideas that others can spread in their own networks.

If you've read this far, I hope you'll take the next step and share it with your network. 

Report looks at Tutor/Mentor Conferences since 1994

I've been hosting Tutor/Mentor Leadership and Networking Conference in Chicago since 1994. The first had 70 participants. The largest was in 1999 with 350. The last few have had 80-100. The one Friday may be lowest attended.

The goal of the conferences and the Tutor/Mentor Connection (T/MC) has been to bring people together to share ideas and learn ways to build and sustain mentor-rich support systems that help youth in high poverty neighborhoods move through school and into work.

Since I began organizing conferences many others in Chicago, and around the country have begun doing their own events, focusing on the same problem, or different parts of the same problem.

I've been trying to develop tools that would visualize and map participation in my conferences, to demonstrate that they should receive financial support, and to convince others to use the same network analysis in their own events.

In 2010 a graduate of DePaul University created some maps and blog-articles showing participation in 2008 and 2009 conferences. You can see her articles here.

This spring a team of students from different parts of the country adopted the Tutor/Mentor Institute, LLC as their client in an Information Visualization MOOC (#IVMOOC) hosted by Indiana University. Here's the final report from the work they were able to do in such a short period of time. On this page you can see how goals for this project were communicated.

The data for the past 42 conferences has now been cleaned, and while my IVMOOC team hopes to continue working with this, I'm inviting students/faculty from universities anywhere in the world to also work with this data. As the analysis of the 2008-09 conferences shows, you can look at this information in many different ways and create quite a few articles making sense of the visualizations.

The IVMOOC team looked at this data from a spatial perspective, using GIS mapping applications, as well as from a social network analysis perspective. This demonstrates a wide range of opportunities for future researchers and writers.

My goal is that as you do this you will convince others who host conferences and large gatherings that focus on poverty, race, inequality, workforce development, health disparities, etc. to apply these tools for their own events. Furthermore, instead of looking for organizers in Chicago, look for organizers in your own city.

Imagine a web site where maps like these from New York, London, LA, Houston, Paris and many other cities who struggle with these same issues are aggregated, so that people who attend different events in each city can easily connect with each other, or can connect with people and ideas from different cities.

Analysis of participation over multiple years should (hopefully) show show more people getting involved, and staying involved, and more support in a greater number of places where poverty is the root cause of many other problems. I hope this work inspires others to get involved with this work, and to share work they are already doing.

November 2015 update. Another volunteer has looked at the conference data, and using a mapping tool called Tableau, has created a map showing participation in all past conferences. See it here. This has a lot of features that we're continuing to explore.

What's on your book shelf? Ferguson? Race? Poverty? Philanthropy?

If you're like me, you have stacks of books, publications and magazines in your home or office that you've collected and set aside for "future reading". While my home library includes books on history and science fiction, my work library includes books on innovation, mentoring, poverty, youth development, leadership, etc.

This image is from a small collection of my library in my office on the North side of Chicago. Between 1993 and 1999 the Tutor/Mentor Connection was hosted at the Montgomery Ward Corporate Headquarters in Chicago and we had lots of space. Thus, we had a huge collection of publications and information files about Chicago area tutor/mentor programs. I also maintained a media clip file, of stories from local media.

However, we all know that once an article is printed, it's out of date. Thus, since 1998 I've been building a much larger library on the Internet than the one in my office. I host it on the Tutor/Mentor Institute, LLC web site and I point to ideas from all over the world. Because I point to the web sites hosting those ideas, people looking at these ideas are also exposed to the web libraries hosted by others. It's a vast network of knowledge available to everyone.

This map is an outline of just one section, where I post research articles and publications related to the challenges facing youth living in high poverty neighborhoods.

The purpose of this library is to support innovation and constant improvement. If program leaders, volunteers and donors can look at what people do in one place that seems to be working, they can expand the range of ideas they have to improve what they do in their own location...as long as they have the talent and resources to apply those ideas.

I created this illustrated essay to show how this information could be used by many to influence actions of others.

Using Ideas to Stimulate Competition and Process Improvement - Concept Paper by Daniel F. Bassill

I was contacted yesterday by a program leader looking for articles mentors could read that are related to some of the high profile media stories, such racial profiling and police shootings, domestic abuse, child abuse, etc. I was preparing an email response, and thought I'd just share that response here with more of you.

The Tutor/Mentor Connection web library has sub sections, and within these are sub-sub sections. One section titled homework help, has many ideas volunteers might look at for engaging their students. In this section there's also one focused on Black History, with links to some sites that could be used to develop discussion and activities.

Another section has the title of Law, Justice, Housing, Poverty and Prevention. Each of the sub sections have links to web sites that volunteers can visit to expand their thinking on issues affecting the youth they work with.

Another section focuses on research, which is also divided into sub categories focused on education, dropout prevention, social capital, mentoring and tutoring. The links I point to usually point to even more links.

I suggest that one activity any tutor/mentor program could undertake is to encourage a small group of youth and volunteers to go through the site, doing a deeper dive into the information. As they do this, they can create presentations that share sites they find valuable with the other youth, volunteers and staff in the organization...or with the larger community. I've been encouraging interns working with me to do this. This is an animation I made to introduce this concept.

New Assignment. A Quest. by tutormentor1 on GoAnimate

Video Maker - Powered by GoAnimate.

I've had interns from different colleges going through my web sites and library to create guides for users. Here's a video showing an animation created in 2009. Some of the links may be broken in this, but it illustrates work that can be done.

My library has been built over 40 years, starting with hard copy information, then moving to the internet in 1998. It was created primarily as my own "book shelf", providing ideas I could use to innovate better ways to recruit youth and volunteers, keep them connected, and have an impact on both groups. I've constantly borrowed ideas from others, and one complete section of the web library focuses on collaboration, innovation, knowledge management, etc. These are ideas that not only apply to tutoring/mentoring, but can be applied to many work/life situations.

Since I operated as a non profit from 1990-2011, one section is focused on philanthropy, and shows challenges that need to be overcome if high quality, long-term youth programs are to be in more places, reaching more youth.

I'm constantly adding to the library, and links often break. If you identify a broken link, send me a note. If you are building your own web library, with information that relates to my library, send me a link and I'll add it. I don't need to gather all knowledge in my library. I only need to point to knowledge that represents "all we need to know" to help well-organized non-school programs connect with youth in high poverty areas, and stay connected as those youth grow up and become adults.

If you're a university and want to co-host this library, or set up a curriculum to teach students and alumni to navigate the library, and use the information in their own actions, please connect. If you're one of the people featured in the philanthropy summit issues of Forbes, and want to put your name on this library and use if for your own purposes, I'd love to hear from you.

Participation in November 2013 Tutor/Mentor Conference

I've been building maps to show participation in the Spring and Fall Tutor/Mentor Leadership and Networking Conferences. The map below shows participation in the last one held in November 2013.

Click here to view this map

This map shows a concentration of programs from the Central/West side of Chicago. It also shows that there are no business, philanthropy, political or media participants.

You can find maps to previous conferences here. They will show a slightly different mix of tutor/mentor program participants but the same lack of participation from resource providers, communicators and policy makers.

The purpose of the conference, and the Tutor/Mentor Connection and Tutor/Mentor Institute, LLC is to help volunteer-based tutor/mentor programs grow in all high poverty neighborhoods. To do that we need to engage resource providers and influence how they support programs in different neighborhoods while we also work to help programs use those resources effectively to constantly improve their impact on youth and volunteers.

See this link for a description of the meaning of this graphic.

The next conference is Monday, May 19 at the Metcalfe Federal Building in Chicago. Help us expand the range of participants to include more of the people who need to be strategically involved in helping tutor/mentor programs grow in all high poverty neighborhoods of the city and suburbs.

Building the Village of Youth Support in Chicago

On Wednesday, August 14 I attended the Why News Matters Summit in Chicago where a variety of speakers talked about "news literacy" and ways to make news literacy education available to youth and adults in more places.

As I registered for the summit I was congratulated by several people for my "letter to the editor" which had been posted in the August 12 issue of Crain's Chicago Business. A couple of people said "I passed this on in my network."

As I listened to the Why News Matters speakers I made notes to myself about how news literacy, and other forms of learning, might be made available to youth in Chicago neighborhoods via non-school, volunteer-based tutor/mentor programs. Last week I used this graphic in an article, to illustrate how volunteers from different work backgrounds could help build learning activities in different programs that would help build youth aspirations and skills for careers not modeled consistently by family or community in high poverty neighborhoods.

When I write about "business teams" my vision is that teams from media, arts, video, banking, engineering, etc. might work as a "virtual corporate office", with goals of identifying existing examples where youth already are exposed to different types of learning, such as the WhyNewsMatters program at Erie House, then recruit and support volunteers from their industry who would help embed these types of learning activities in other programs throughout the Chicago region (or in other cities).

I've already created a section of my web library with links to Chicago tutor/mentor programs, and with links to organizations that include health, STEM or arts as part of their activities. Existing programs can learn from what other programs are already doing. They can bring these ideas into their own programs if volunteers and business partners will help make that happen.

I've hosted a Tutor/Mentor Leadership and Networking Conference in Chicago for the past 20 years. It's goal has been to share ideas that work in some programs so that they can be duplicated in other programs, reaching more kids throughout the Chicago region. It's goal is also to find people who are looking at this from a much larger scale than a single program, or a single youth and volunteer. If you're WalMart, or any other big corporation, your "big question" is how to put profitable stores in thousands of locations. Through the conferences, social media, and constant network building, I'm trying to connect with people who are engaged in this kind of thinking.

How do we make mentor-rich programs available to k-16 youth in all place where they are needed? This can only happen if businesses, and business volunteers, help make that happen.

The next conference will be Monday, November 4, at the Metcalfe Federal Building in Chicago. I created this page on the conference web site to show a list of activities that could be demonstrated via workshops and panel discussions. If you have an arts, technology, writing, journalism, entrepreneurship, etc. component to your youth mentoring and tutoring strategy, please make time to organize a workshop and share your strategy with others.