Want to make a difference? ReThink Philanthropy

 One of the people I follow on Twitter is Vu Le, who posts Tweets like the one below:

Hey funders, remember this ancient proverb: “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, give multi-year general operating dollars, invest in BIPOC leaders, and knock it off with all the BS in your grant applications”

— Vu Le (@NonprofitAF) August 10, 2020

I've focused on improving the flow of operating dollars to non-school, volunteer-based tutor, mentor and learning programs in every high poverty neighborhood of Chicago since starting the Tutor/Mentor Connection in 1993.  In one section of the Tutor/Mentor web library I focus on fund raising challenges faced by non-profit organizations.  

I've been using this "Mentoring Kids to Careers" graphic, along with various versions, since late 1990s to emphasize the on-going support kids need from pre-school through high school, then beyond, to assure that more of the youth who are born in high poverty areas are starting jobs and lives free of poverty when they are adults.

In the lower left corner is a map of Chicago, with high poverty areas shaded grey. These are the areas where mentor-rich programs are most needed.  In this article you can find my list of programs and see how I plot them on a map. This helps people find existing programs in different parts of Chicago and hopefully is used by planners to determine where more are needed.

Below I've created another version, highlighting one stage on this career ladder.

Kids grow one year at a time. Support  needed for many years.

It's great to be able to provide a youth tutoring and/or mentoring activity that lasts for one, or two years, but it takes 12 years to move from first grade through high school and four to six more years beyond that to be starting a job and career.

The challenge Chicago and other places face is building and sustaining k-12 support programs in every high poverty neighborhood.  

This means we needed to find money every year to pay the bills. That was always a challenge. The graphics below illustrate this challenge.

Note the inclusion of maps in these graphics. Unless donors use maps to assure a distribution of dollars into areas with high poverty, they may make billions of dollars in gifts and still miss  most of the areas where help is most needed. I've devoted the entire MappingForJustice blog since 2008 to show ways maps can be used. You can also see uses of maps in articles on this blog.

In past years a GIVING TUESDAY campaign has attempted to draw donor attention and increase giving to non-profit organizations.  I created the graphic at the lift a few years ago to visualize the need for year-round giving, making every day a "Giving Tuesday".  Much of what I write about on this blog focuses on ways to build the on-going public attention that would motivate such giving habits, as well as the program directories and maps needed to guide giving into every high poverty area, not just a few high profile programs. 

Between 2005 and 2015 interns spent time viewing articles like this, then created their own interpretations. You can find many at this link. Others who I've met via the Internet have also tried to help share these ideas. On this concept map I post links to some of their articles.

 
More people need to do this. Read this and other articles I've written, then create and share your own version. Let's join Vu Le in advocating for changes in how philanthropy works.

 

There's a tremendous amount of wealth in Chicago, and the US, but much of it is not yet being focused on helping build and sustain great learning and mentoring opportunities in all high poverty neighborhoods, reach kids at school, and in the non-school hours.

If these graphics resonate with you then let's find places on the Internet, and in Chicago, where we can begin to connect and look for solutions.  I'm on Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin and Instagram (see links). 

If you value what I'm writing about please consider a small contribution to help me keep doing it. 

eMentoring and On-Line Documentation

 On Friday I listened to a webinar hosted by the National Mentoring Partnership which focused on e-Mentoring and ways organizations have responded to Covid19 by building on-line connections.  Below I've posted a few Tweets.

When the video from yesterday's #mentoringAmplifies is available I encourage those in the #tutor #mentor ecosystem to view it. The #ementoring ideas could be applied in many places, including to site-based programs that will continue virtual learning in the future. https://t.co/uFbZHcLSxS

— Daniel Bassill (@tutormentorteam) March 20, 2021

another

I hope donors are looking at the @icouldbeorg model and thinking of ways they could help local #tutor #mentor programs become a partner. No sense reinventing the wheel when it's been perfected. W/o funds hard for programs to adopt. #MentoringAmplifies https://t.co/4Zz5G0GKsm

— Daniel Bassill (@tutormentorteam) March 19, 2021

another

#eMentoring programs like @CricketMediaInc helped sustain adult mentoring connections with youth even when schools had difficulty connecting. eMentoring opens access to kids who might not normally have access to a site-based program. #MentoringAmplifies pic.twitter.com/ff9kDl3vI9

— Daniel Bassill (@tutormentorteam) March 19, 2021

another

Youth Mentoring Caucus website: https://t.co/6gmYiJ9Hlz#MentoringAmplifies

— Daniel Bassill (@tutormentorteam) March 19, 2021

I led a volunteer-based tutor/mentor program from 1975 to 2011. Since both kids and adults were volunteers I used participation tracking to monitor matches and evaluate program success.  My primary tool for doing this was Excel spreadsheets and manual data input and monitoring. 

In 2008-9 we introduced an on-line documentation system, called Student-Volunteer History and Tracking system (SVHATS).  Unfortunately this site is no longer available, but here's one page that's available on the Internet archive and here's a series of articles on the Cabrini Blog that refer to SVHATS.   Here's a PDF that describes the planning that was involved in building SVHATS.

If you compare this to what I Could Be has created over the past 15 years you'll see that we were headed in that direction.  Unfortunately the 2008 financial meltdown reduced our funding and ability to further develop SVHATS and then my leaving Cabrini Connections in 2011 removed the energy and commitment to using an on-line platform to support youth, volunteers and staff.  

I've been using maps since 1993 to visualize the need for well-organized, constantly improving, mentor-rich non-school programs in every high poverty neighborhood of Chicago and other places.

I maintain a list of nearly 200 non-school and school-based tutoring and/or mentoring programs, and point to many arts, STEM, and service learning programs in the main Tutor/Mentor library.  

Everyone of them could be using the I Could Be platform, or something similar, if donors and tech volunteers would step forward to offer help.  This means providing on-going operating support, not one-time development grants.  

My graphics visualize long-term goals of helping kids living in poverty move through school and into adult lives. On-line platforms enable kids and volunteers to connect with each other, and with program resources, for a lifetime!  This was never possible in the years before 2000 and still is not the vision of many youth organizations or public schools.

On Thursday I watched a different webinar, hosted by the Shaping.edu program at Arizona State University, which was focused on "Promoting Broadband Access".  Below is a Tweet from that webinar.

Wondering why #BroadbandAccess is important for work & learning? @cosmodog, through LinkedIn Learning, hosted a session w/@L_Geringer, @techzebu, @rubenrp & me yesterday to talk about @ShapingEDU's initiative: https://t.co/ui2XtwXqum. #ConnectedForLearning #DigitalAffluece pic.twitter.com/lu1qSnEDhd

— Paul Signorelli (@paulsignorelli) March 19, 2021

Among the presenters was Paul  Signorelli who I met via the ETMOOC event in early 2013.  I've been a fan of Paul's blog and I encourage you to read some of his "changing the world articles". Several focus on digital access. 

Shaping.edu is described at "Shaping.edu is a community of dreamers, doers and drivers shaping the future of learning in the digital age. We are value-led changemakers who envision positive learning futures and undertake concrete action to bring about those futures, together." Visit the website and learn about the "10 actions needed to shape the future of learning in the digital age". Anyone can join this group. Much is done on-line.  

The Thursday and Friday events are connected. Without increasing the number of people who care about the challenges facing people in poverty and who act regularly to provide an on-going flow of dollars, technology, volunteers, talent and leadership into EVERY youth program, in EVERY high poverty neighborhood, schools and non-profits will not be able to adopt technology like that of I Could Be, nor keep it part of their programs for 10 to 20 years, with constant improvement. 

In almost all of my articles I call for those who read them to turn around and share them with others, and teach them to do the same.  That's how I'll finish this one. 

Colleges and Universities have a constant flow of talent and alumni who could be leading a Tutor/Mentor Connection 4-part strategy as part of their own learning and service.  While my focus is on helping kids in poverty via organized tutor/mentor programs, the 4-part strategy could be used to aggregate information about digital access, racial justice, climate crisis, or any other issue.

Here are a few articles where I've outlined that opportunity.  

I'm on Twitter, Linkedin, Facebook and Instagram (see links) and hope to connect and share ideas with people who read my blog articles or are doing similar work in different places. 

I'm also dependent of a small group of donors to help keep sharing these ideas. Click here if you'd like to make a contribution. 

Role of Veteran Volunteers

 Last August I posted this article announcing that a Michigan consulting firm called Great Lakes Growth Works was interested in talking to youth program leaders about their experiences during Covid19.  Yesterday I received an email telling me the blog article showing the outcome of these conversations was now available. Then, today, I saw this post on Linkedin, by Phil Roos, leader of GrowthWorks, and a former volunteer with the tutor/mentor program I was leading in the 1980s.

Let's look at some history behind this.  I led tutor/mentor programs in Chicago from 1975 to 2011 and for many of those years I created a yearbook to end each year. These included photos and  names of each pair of kids/volunteers.  

About 10 years ago I began to go through the yearbooks to find names of volunteers. I then did a search on Linkedin and Facebook to see if I could find them.  I did the same with former students.

That's how I re-connected with Phil Roos several years ago. He was working at the Quaker Oats Company in Chicago in the mid 1980s when he was a volunteer.  That's him at the left with his mentee. 

We reconnected on Linkedin and Facebook and as I told him about my continued efforts to help tutor/mentor programs grow, he became an annual contributor to support the Tutor/Mentor Institute, LLC (click here to donate). 

As we've interacted I saw that Phil's consulting firm had started a series of conversations with community and clients in Spring 2020 to learn how Covid19 was affecting them and their businesses.  I suggested that interviewing leaders of tutor/mentor programs might provide some valuable insights and Phil agreed. His team worked with me to develop some questions and a list of people to interview. I announced this in a blog last August and in my eMail newsletter.  That led to the blog article Great Lakes Growth Works posted this week.

This is what I've encourage many other veteran volunteers and students to do. Use your talent to share your own experiences and to encourage people you know to support tutor/mentor programs in cities across the world. Take time to learn about the intermediary role the Tutor/Mentor Connection launched in 1993 and that I've continued via the Tutor/Mentor Institute, LLC since 2011.  If no one is building a library of youth programs and trying to draw attention and resources to those programs, then someone needs to duplicate the Tutor/Mentor Connection so that information is available.

I started the Tutor/Mentor Connection in 1993 at the same time as we were launching the Cabrini Connections tutor/mentor program, which I led until 2011.  We had no money and just 7 volunteers when we began. Thus, while we had an ambitious vision, we had few resources to tell people what we were doing.

From 1993 to 2002 we had support from a Chicago PR firm, who helped us develop a year-round event strategy, including networking conferences in May and November, a Tutor/Mentor Week in November, and a volunteer mobilization in August/September.  We published our list of programs in a printed Directory every year from May 1994 through 2002. We also published a quarterly printed newsletter which grew from 400 people in 1993 to 12,000 in 2002.  You can find past news articles here, and past newsletters here.  

However, all of this was too little to reach and influence the millions of people in Chicago and around the country who need to be strategically involved in  helping youth in poverty areas, via organized, volunteer-based tutor, mentor and learning programs.

In 1998 we began to put our library and list of programs on the internet, and use email newsletters to share ideas.  This enabled us to reach more people in all parts of the world, but was still only reaching a few people.  In addition, the loss of Montgomery Ward as host and funder, the dot-com financial meltdown, the 9/11 market collapse, then the 2008 collapse all increased our expenses but reduced the money we had to do all that needed to be done to support our Cabrini Connections kids, and the Tutor/Mentor Connection strategy.  

Since 2011 I've had even fewer resources to support the Tutor/Mentor Connection.  The Cabrini Connections program became Chicago Tutoring Connection, and is now struggling to stay alive.

Without money for advertising and public relations I've always encouraged our volunteers and students to help tell stories of the work we were doing, in an effort to increase the number of people we were reaching and who would support us, or other tutor/mentor programs in Chicago.

I created this concept map a few years ago to show how others have been helping me tell the story of the T/MC and Tutor/Mentor Institute, LLC and help others learn what I was doing and how they might duplicate it.

I added a node at the bottom left of this concept map today, showing the blog articles on the Great Lakes Growth Works site. I'd love to add more showing others who are helping make sense of the strategies I've been sharing and to find others who will apply them in more places while helping me re-energize them in Chicago.

Thank you Phil, Elizabeth, Taylor and the team at Great Lakes Growth Works. 

I'm on Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin. You can find links on this page. I'm looking forward to connecting with you. 

Movement Building - It Takes a Village

Last Friday, March 5, 2021 I watched a series of Poverty Narrative panel discussions hosted by the Poverty Solutions program at the University of Michigan.  Their commitment is to "provide rapid response data and analysis to community stakeholders and policymakers who want to enhance economic mobility and decrease poverty." At the link shown above you can see descriptions of all four panel discussions and find links to the recorded events.

The above photo is from the final panel titled: Confronting Inequity in Public Health 

As panel members described the massive effort to find a cure for Covid19 and then build a distribution system to get the vaccine to millions of people, I thought of the concept map I'm showing below

This includes my "mentoring kids to careers" graphic showing 12 years of support needed to help kids from first grade through high school.  At each stage a wide range of support is needed.  I've created a concept map to visualize some of these supports. I hope you'll look at it.

 

To the right of the "mentoring kids to careers" graphic is a visualization of the many challenges kids and families living in high poverty areas face as they make this journey.  Public health issues are just one of those.  Each one of these challenges represents an ecosystem of people from around the world who have expertise or are working to solve that piece of the problem. 

I'd love to find others creating concept maps for each of these challenge areas.  I'd add a link from my map to each of those, providing a much deeper visualization of the complex challenges. 

The UN's Sustainability Goals website does a good jobs showing the ecosystem around each of it's 17 SDG goals.  The World Economic Forum (WEF) also has an extensive library, organized by issue.  

The "challenges map" also includes a small map of Chicago, with high poverty areas shaded. Each of these areas needs a full set of birth-to-work supports that address each of the challenges facing kids and families. Maps of other cities would show similar concentrations of poverty. 

As I watched the final panel another one of my concept maps came to mind. This one is a worksheet, showing "talent needed".  

Building and sustaining organizations and movements requires an ability to recruit people with needed skills and talent, who represent a wide range of stakeholders.  If you're missing some of these the work will be much more difficult, if not impossible.

In the blue box at the top of this concept map are links to another maps, showing "network needed". 

As I watched the panel discussions I shared what I was seeing and what I was thinking with a series of posts on Twitter.  Below is a Tweet where I highlighted the use of maps in communicating information. 

Jonathon Berlin of @chicagotribune talking about how media use platforms of others to create stories. This is what I've been encouraging for many years. Teach youth this skill! #povertynarrative pic.twitter.com/q2vYgDzv0f

— Daniel Bassill (@tutormentorteam) March 5, 2021

You can see all of these if you search #PovertyNarrative then look at the latest posts. What depresses me  is that less than 100 people were watching the live panel discussions last Friday and fewer than a dozen were posting introductions, comments or ideas to the PovertyNarrative Twitter feed.  Thus, the number of people connecting to each other was too small to do much with the information shared.  

However, that's how movements get started. 

As you look at these ideas think about the work needed to build networks of people who focus on solving big or small problems in one or more specific places.  I've used the graphic at the left for more than 20 years to show how one person, with a vision, starts sharing that vision with others, hoping to build a team of people who will embrace it and share the work needed.  If that team has the mix of talent shown above, and can stay involved for many years, great things can happen.  Here's one article that I encourage you to read.

However, depending on the level of resources you have, and the power or influence of the people in your network, this can be just a really difficult process, or an almost impossible one. 

If you share this article with others, you're helping me build the network. If you write your own article and interpret what you're reading, and how it applies to a piece of geography that you care about, you are doing even more.  If you reach out to me with a "how can I use my time, talent and knowledge to help you do this work, you become one of the people in that small first group on the far left of the graphic. 

I can be found on Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin and other social media sites. Find links on this page.

Case for Business Investment in Tutor/Mentor Programs

I created graphics like the one at the left to visualize the 12 years of constant support needed to assure that more kids born or living in high poverty areas are in jobs with networks of support by their mid 20's.

You can find examples like this in many of my blog articles.  Most of these focus on non-school, volunteer-based tutor/mentor programs as an important resource.  They provide on-going benefit to youth and to the volunteers who get involved.  

They need constant support and that's the problem for most, who are relatively small and don't have staff for advertising, public relations, fund raising, etc.  Thus, I've created a series of concept maps showing why businesses should support such programs. Below is one:

Here's the link to the cMap.

Creating these is only one step in an on-going process. Sharing them and increasing the number who view them, then use them, is actually much more difficult, since I've never had the advertising budget to build awareness for them.  

So I've been sharing them via my Twitter feed and on Facebook and Linkedin.  Below is a Tweet thread posted in the past few days.

This #conceptmap shows a commitment that many leaders need to make to help kids in poverty move from #birthtowork. I've circled a section that opens to a map showing reasons business should adopt this. Start here. https://t.co/lHeYxjMhtr pic.twitter.com/HZoFFP9fAW

— Daniel Bassill (@tutormentorteam) March 3, 2021

Take a look.  Share the concept maps and my blog articles with others. Use 

for your own learning and leadership and create your own versions to share with others.

I don't need a huge advertising budget if every day one, or many, are reading these articles and sharing them with others.

Visit this page to find my social media links.

Visit this page if you'd like to make a contribution to help fund the Tutor/Mentor Institute, LLC. 

Sharing past articles on Twitter

I've been writing on this blog for 15 years and I feel that some of the articles from the past are better than others.  I've encouraged people to use this blog as a study guide, a planning tool, and a resource for anyone seeking to help kids born or living in high poverty areas now move safely through school and into adult lives, jobs and careers.

To help people find past articles I often share some in Tweets.  Below are two that I posted this morning, showing "end of February" articles.

We're headed to a new month. Here's what I wrote at end of Feb 2012.

In Feb 2014 I wrote about #Obama's #MyBrothersKeeper in this article on #tutor #mentor blog. https://t.co/GlIz7xy3eq pic.twitter.com/TIUWsJScAQ

— Daniel Bassill (@tutormentorteam) February 28, 2021

If you're using Twitter I encourage you to connect with me and follow the Tweets I share and then read some of the articles on this blog that I'm pointing to.

Share with others. Help build the network of support needed to make youth tutor, mentor and learning programs available in more places.

Navigating the Tutor/Mentor Resource Library

I started this blog in 2005 and have posted more than 1000 articles. Prior to that I had been creating PDF essays that I shared here, and before the internet, I used printed newsletters (see archive) which reached up to 12,000 people by 2002. 

This represents 40 years asking the same questions over, and over each year. All focused on helping volunteer-based tutor/mentor programs reach k-12 youth in high poverty hours, with long-term efforts that transform the lives of both kids and volunteers.

I started asking these questions when I first became a tutor in 1973 then a program leader in 1975.  As a leader my role was to focus on creating a structure that would enable individual pairs of youth and volunteers to connect, build relationships, and provide a wide range of learning and mentoring support based on the needs of each individual student. Those needs kept changing from year-to-year, as they grew up. I also had to recruit those students and volunteers and keep them involved.  When we became a non profit in 1990, I had to learn how to raise money to pay the bills, too. 

So, I've learned much. I've collected a lot of information and produced a ton of material. Now, how do I help people navigate this?

I've tried many things, but below I'm going to show just a few.

The first website for the Tutor/Mentor Connection was created by one of my volunteers in 1998 and given the name http://www.tutormentorconnection.org  The graphic at the left was the original design on the home page of that website. You could click on any spoke and go to a page with information related to it. You can view this page in the Internet Archive. This site was rebuilt in 2006 by a team from IUPUI, then again in 2011 by a volunteer from IUPUI.

In 2008 the site crashed in August just prior to the annual Citywide Volunteer Recruitment Campaign, so Steve Roussos, a volunteer from the  University of Kansas, created a second site, named http://www.tutormentorexchange.net.   While the original site was working again in a few months I began to use the new site to host PDF essays that I had been creating to visually communicate the ideas and strategies that I had been building since 1975.  In 2011 when I formed Tutor/Mentor Institute, LLC, I used this site as my primary website.

So, if you want to know what resources I have available, you need to take time to tour the site, opening every link, just like going into every store as you (used to) visit a new shopping mall.  To help you along an intern from South Korea created the video below in 2015.

When you're on this website be sure to look at the Mission, Vision and Strategy pages on the right side.

So that's one way to learn what information I host, but it's not a logical, step-by-stem learning guide.

Thus, a few years ago I created the concept  map shown below.

You start with the blue box at the top left, then work your way down, reading the linking text, and opening the links under each box to see what it points to. You might start just by reading through the entire concept map without opening any links. That will give you an overall understanding. Then go back and dig deeper.

Once again, I was lucky to have an Intern from South Korea do a visual introduction of this concept map. She created it using Prezi, then put that in a video.  Unfortunately the original Prezi is no longer available, but the video does a nice job.

 

Using these videos and concept map you should have enough of an understanding for you to be motivated to dig deeper, into the strategy essays and concept maps and the many articles on this blog.

In the first graphic of this article I wrote "what are all the things we need to know and do".  If you look at the tag cloud at the left, these words represent categories of knowledge that we need to know, if we're going to do everything needed to fill high poverty neighborhoods with well organized, well funded, non-school tutor, mentor and learning programs that help kids entering fist grade today be finishing 12th grade and headed on to college, vocational education and/or jobs 12 years later.

There is no short cut. ALL of these ideas need to be understood and implemented in every city and state of the US and the world.  

One of the tags is "Tipping Points" which represents actions that might make all of this more possible.  I included the graphic at the right in this article, suggesting that the body of ideas and library of links be hosted by a university (or more) and incorporated into a degree program intended to produce leaders who understood all of this information as they entered their careers.

Wona Chang was the intern from South Korea who created these two videos in 2015. Meet her and other interns on this site. 

If you're read this far, thank you.  Now think of ways you might enlist students from your own community to read these and create their own interpretations, just as Wona and past interns have done. Maybe that could be part of a class at a high school or university.

I'm on Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin and Instagram. Find links here. I look forward to connecting with you and talking about these ideas and seeing how you are sharing them, or your own strategies.

If you'd like to help Fund the Tutor/Mentor Institute, LLC, click here. 

Have you drawn attention to "Black History Month"?

This map shows segregation in the Chicago region and is part of an extensive article titled: "Segregation Map: America is more diverse than ever, but still segregated", in the May 2, 2018 Washington Post. I show the map and share a link to the article in this post on the MappingforJustice blog. 

February is Black History Month and millions are doing something to draw attention and to encourage study of Slavery and Black history in America.

If you've liked, reTweeted, or done anything to draw attention to Black History Month, I urge you to take time to read this article in The Atlantic, by Ta-Nehisi Coates. It's titled "The Case for Reparations" and reviews the long history of slavery, Jim Crow, separate but not equal, housing discrimination, etc. in America.  

Maps are a valuable tool for showing where people were most affected and where they need the most help.  You can find many map-based articles on this blog.   

In addition, I've been highlighting some of the stories and websites hosting them in articles on the MappingforJustice blog. As I've done this I've added updates to some articles as I find new information.  Here's an example, where I've added updates to this article on Redlining, which is a formal practice that forced Black Americans to live in highly segregated cities. 

I've been building a library of information, freely available to anyone, since 1993.  One section focuses on Black History and another on Poverty, Race and Inequality.   

As I've found new articles I began adding updates to the bottom of blog articles a few years ago.  I created this concept map to aggregate links to some of those and to help readers find the articles I'm hoping many will read.  

In a busy world full of social media too many people don't spend much time reading and thinking deeply about issues that affect them, their children and grandchildren, and their communities.  

I created the graphics below in the 1990s to visualize how a site-based tutor/mentor program can attract volunteers from diverse backgrounds, workplaces, colleges, etc.  As they connect with kids they become a form of bridging social capital, expanding the network of "who you know" that helps people find opportunities and overcome challenges.

However, these graphics also communicate another idea. Those people who become involved can share what they are learning and what they are reading with people in their family, work, college, religious and social networks, educating more people and getting more people involved in helping kids to careers by direct involvement in organized tutor/mentor programs or in working to remove the structural barriers that have built up over hundreds of years.

I've posted nearly 300 articles focused on "learning" on this blog. Most are not aimed at the type of learning students do in school. They focus on learning adults need to do to create a better world for themselves, their kids and grand kids, and for all others at the same time.  You can't read all these in a day, but you could visit many if it were part of an on-going process.  

Think of my blogs as "Sunday School for Future Leaders" where groups of people gather weekly, read some text, discuss it, then go live their lives, hopefully applying what they read.

If you're reading this. Make an effort to share it.  

I depend on contributions to help fund the Tutor/Mentor Institute, LLC. Click here if you'd like to help. 

Happy Valentine's Day! Spread Hope & Opportunity to All

It's Valentine's Day, so I'm pointing to these graphics which were created by two interns from South Korea during a a seven week internship in 2012.  I wrote about it and included a link to the animation in this article.

This article from the DePaul University Center for Writing-Based Learning includes its own message of Love.  Another article, by Simon Ensor, a professor in France, communicates the same idea and points to ideas I've been sharing at the Tutor/Mentor Blog.

Here's another graphic, also created by the 2012 intern team. Song Me Lee wrote this article, to show how the graphic was created, and to show what she'd been learning during her internship.  I encourage you to look at all of the messages posted by Song Me during her internship.  

On this page of the Tutor/Mentor Institute, LLC web site I post a list of interns from 2006 till 2015, with links to articles they wrote to introduce themselves at the start of their internship, and then links to final reflection articles.  Some provide more information than others, but all show an intent that the intern learn new ideas and new skills from working on their projects.

As I've interviewed students for these internships I've emphasized that one of my goals is that these students continue to stay connected to the Tutor/Mentor Connection library of ideas and to each other, so that in future years they become a community of people who help each other, and who apply these ideas to making the world a better place.

Forming a College-Based Tutor/Mentor Connection by Daniel F. Bassill

 

I created this presentation to show a goal of having student-led Tutor/Mentor Connection-type teams growing on high school and college campuses throughout the US and the world.  Anyone who takes a few moments to view my blogs and then shares what I'm writing about, as Simon Ensor has done on his blog, is providing inspiration and motivation for one or many people to take this roll.

I'm still waiting for the first university or high school to adopt this strategy, and for the first corporation or benefactor to endow it with 10 years of funding, but as they say "Rome was not built in a day."   

I created this concept map to illustrate this vision. If you start writing about my ideas and/or creating your own visualizations, share the link in the comment box and I'll add you to this map.

Better yet, create your own map, and add my blog articles to it.  

Through the collective effort of many, we'll gather the bricks needed to build the "Rome" of this vision.

Building a Super Bowl of Support for Youth Serving Programs

If we want great youth serving organizations reaching k-12 youth in all high poverty neighborhoods of Chicago and other places we need to provide traditional training to help staff, volunteers, board members learn how to build effective programs.

However, unless we also educate resource providers, volunteers, media and political leaders to take an active, on-going role that delivers operating resources, talent, ideas and technology to programs in every neighborhood, on an on-going basis, few programs will have the resources needed to put good ideas into practice.

Read on. If you agree, share with people in your own network.  

I posted this graphic on my blog in April 2013. It expresses a lot of ideas. So I thought I’d try to break it down into components.  After you review this I encourage volunteers, youth and others to create their own versions, using animation, video, different social media platforms, etc.  

Share your versions with me and on social media. 

Here is same graphic, but with numbers on different parts. In the paragraphs below I’ll show the meaning.

To get to the goal we want we need to influence both resource providers and program organizers.

First, the goal of this graphic, and the Tutor/Mentor Institute, LLC is to help high quality, long-term, site-based tutor/mentor programs grow in high poverty neighborhoods. This section of the Tutor/Mentor web library includes dozens of research articles that show the impact of poverty, indicating the potential benefits of mentor-rich programs.

Second, if we want mentor-rich programs in more high poverty neighborhoods, then we must find ways to increase the flow of needed resources to all programs, and keep this consistent for many years. To do that we need to influence what the donor and resource provider do, not just what programs do.

I’ve followed last week's National Mentoring Summit and posted comments on Twitter. More than 1,000 people attended virtual the Summit. I shared a few of my Twitter posts in this article. 

The workshops called attention to mentoring as a strategy but even with 1000 participants there are too few paying attention.  Two workshops called attention to building relationships as an outcome of organized volunteer-based programs, pointing to social capital ideas and theory.  However, they said, "too few programs actually use social capital terms in describing their strategy and input."  In addition, they reported that "too few schools and educators have strategies intended to help youth build needed relationships."

These are “attention gaps” we need to close and we cannot do that without more consistent, and strategic, support from business, public leaders, media and other potential resource providers.

Let’s look at this chart closer:

A tutor/mentor program supports a connection between an adult volunteer with a youth living in an area where indicators show extra adult support and learning activities are needed. NOTE: many mentoring strategies are not primarily focused on youth living in high poverty. However, there is much research showing that for youth living in high poverty the non-school hours offer risk if not filled with positive learning activities and that there are too few resources in most neighborhoods. The Tutor/Mentor Institute's primary focus is helping mentor rich programs reach youth living in high poverty areas of big cities like Chicago.

There are a wide variety of formal mentoring programs, and many youth are involved in informal mentoring. This 2014 report: The Mentoring Effect, shows that too few youth are engaged in formal mentoring.  This remains true in 2020, and with the remote learning restrictions posted by Covid19, there are even greater gaps in mentoring availability. 

This is one graphic from my web site illustrating a need to support youth for many years. On Pinterest.com you can find more graphics like this, which point to a long-term result, which is when kids have made the journey from first grade through high school, post high school learning, and into jobs with family level wages or better. Our aim is to help youth programs build strategies that support this long-term goal.

View this "Mentoring Kids to Careers" concept map for a different version of this #birthtowork idea.

This graphic is intended to illustrate the infrastructure needed in every tutor/mentor program. Most people, including youth and volunteers, don’t see the work it takes to recruit and retain youth and volunteers, and find the operating dollars and other resources needed to build an ongoing program. See this graphic at this link.

This "tipping point" article talks about building future leaders and donors for mentor-rich programs.

This article uses teams on a football field to visualize the idea that great teams need a wide range of on-going support. So do great youth programs.  

I’ve piloted uses of maps since 1994 to illustrate the need for organized tutor/mentor programs in every high poverty neighborhood of Chicago. Without the maps donors and media focus on a few high profile programs, or a few high profile neighborhoods. You don't get a distribution of resources to all of the neighborhoods, or all of the programs, which need consistent support.

The oil well graphic indicates the need for programs to help youth from birth to work. See more maps at http://mappingforjustice.blogspot.com

Most efforts to support non profits, including tutor/mentor programs, share ideas that help programs improve themselves, and their operations. This concept map shows a section of the Tutor/Mentor Web library that represents a college of resources that tutor/mentor leaders could draw from to be better at what they do.

However, most smaller programs are so overwhelmed and under financed that they can't draw from this information for on-going learning as much as they need to. This section of the library should be read by business leaders, donors and policy makers. It shows challenges facing non profits.

As the Iceberg graphic demonstrated, every program has common needs for a wide range of talent. Few have the money to hire all the talent they need or purchase the best technology and other tools needed to run a high quality business.

This is where we need to grow. Business leaders have tremendous expertise in building chains of stores operating in multiple locations. I wrote about Polk Bros, showing how advertising and sales promotion were used to draw customers to stores. On Pinterest I show many graphics that illustrate the role of business and professionals could take to draw needed resources to volunteer-based tutoring and/or mentoring programs all over the city. I created this “Virtual Corporate office PDF” to illustrate the way volunteer talent in many companies and industries could be mobilized and focused on supporting the growth of tutor/mentor programs throughout big cities like Chicago.

If programs are consistently supported, and are constantly learning from each other, and engaging all of their supporters in efforts to constantly improve the organization’s impact, they should be able to show on their web sites many indicators of their value and impact. This pdf illustrates some of the things a “shopper” should want to see when looking at a tutor/mentor program’s web site.

Teams of volunteers from business, universities, high schools, etc. could help programs collect and share this information on web sites, and could provide some of the advertising support needed every day to encourage more people to look at these web sites and provide support to help one, or many, programs grow.

As a result of this support there should be many programs with a long-term history and the ability to posts murals like this, showing youth and volunteers who have been part of programs in the past, and who are still connected to those programs today, while helping programs provide services to the next generation of youth.

Now, when you look at this graphic, do you understand what it is showing? Can you share this with people in your own network? Take a look at this blog to see how interns have been creating visualizations and new interpretations of graphics like this. Start a project at your school, or in your church or in your tutor/mentor program, where youth and volunteers create their own interpretations, focusing on your own community and/or school neighborhood if you're not in Chicago.

While Super Bowl advertising is drawing attention to products and services offered by various companies, we need a similar level of outreach to draw attention to ideas like this and to lists of youth tutor/mentor programs in Chicago and other cities, encouraging volunteers to give time, talent and dollars to build great youth tutoring, mentoring and learning programs in more places.

Since we don't have the advertising dollars to lead such a campaign we depend on the voices of individuals.  Can you be one of those voices?  

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