Tutor/Mentor Institute, LLC Blog 2005-2012

What have I written about Complex Problems

This is Dan Bassill using maps to show where tutor/mentor programs are needed in Chicago. Since 2005 Bassill has written more than 1000 blog articles to share the same ideas with readers throughout the world.

Use the blog to support your own groups discussions about poverty and ways you can make a difference. Since early 2005 I have been using a blog as my
own news commentary intended to draw attention to information and ideas that would lead to a richer system of supports helping youth in high poverty neighborhoods of Chicago and other cities move through K-12 public schools and into college or vocational school, then jobs and careers. I feel some of the articles written in past years are just as relevant as those written today. Thus, Ive been looking for ways to call attention and point readers to these.

Tutor/Mentor Institute, LLC Blog 2005-2012

Follow these steps to find articles on the blog:

This is a screen shot from the home page
http://tutormentor.blogspot.com Every article is labeled with key words. These are listed on the left side of the blog. Click on any of these and then scroll through those articles.

You can also search by year, month and date to locate a specific article. Just scroll down the left side of the blog to find this section.

On the following pages every article includes the date written and title.
Friday, July 13, 2012 Where do Mentors Learn?
In Chicago there are probably 5,000 adult volunteers serving in organized tutoring and/or mentoring programs as tutors, mentors, and on volunteer board. In the program locator database I show 172 organizations. I'm sure there are additional places where volunteers are connecting with kids, but I don't have that information. There are more than 200,000 school age youth living in high poverty areas of Chicago. We need thousand more volunteers in this system. Where are people going for data and ideas that could empower them to help programs grow, and to help the kids in these programs become active learners and CEOs in their own lives? Where do these volunteers go to get this information?

Wednesday, July 11, 2012 Poverty, Media, Leadership Monday's Chicago Sun-Times devoted the first three pages to Mayor Emanuel's response to the high murder rate in Chicago. On page 2 is a full-page commentary by Mary Mitchell, under the headline "We've heard this all before." Yes, we have. I've posted this front page from the October 15, 1992 Chicago Sun-Times on this blog at least once a year since 1995. I included it in print newsletters I was sending from 1994 to 2001 (while I still had money to do this.) Wednesday, June 13, 2012 CPS Anti Violence Program Not Enough The front page of today's Chicago Tribune featured a photo and story under the headline: Anti-violence program fails to save young Markham man. The story talked about the highly visible and very expensive Chicago Public Schools anti-violence mentoring program designed to target a small group of youth with high potential for being involved in gang violence. For one youth, that was not enough to keep him from being gunned down in Chicago this week. The final line in the story is "He died with bullets in his head, chest and arm, and a mentor who keeps wondering what else he could have done. I've written about violence in Chicago in many past blog articles. I've included maps in my stories to try to focus attention on the need for a wide range of youth supports in these neighborhoods. I've created an interactive map/program locator that anyone can use to see the connection between poverty and poorly performing schools and to learn about volunteer-based tutoring and/or mentoring programs operating in different parts of the city. This is not a new problem. However, we have never found a way to a) bring enough people from all sectors into a learning and service process where we build empathy through our direct involvement and we build growing understanding through the on-going reading we do from libraries of research like the one I've been hosting for the last 15 years. B )we've never found a way to keep this story in the media and in business publications on a daily basis the way fast food stores, banks and other retailers keep their products and services in front of potential customers. Without consistent advertising we can never get enough people and resources involved in all the places where concentrated, segregated poverty is the root-cause of the violence.

c) we've not found a way to make this issue important enough to business so that they would have teams of people working regularly to find ways to reach kids with volunteers, ideas, technology and jobs training programs that expand the social capital connecting youth in islands of poverty with the rest of Chicago and the opportunities these young people have in the future.

Visit http://tutormentor.blogspot.com to read full article.

Wednesday, July 11, 2012 Poverty, Media, Leadership My goal is that people who are outraged by the stories they see in the local news will form learning circles in their business, company, school and/or faith group and build their own understanding of the program, and their own belief in strategies that connect kids in poverty neighborhoods with ideas and networks of people beyond their own neighborhoods. Volunteer-based tutor/mentor programs can do this if they are structured to encourage long-term connections of kids and volunteers and if they are available in the neighborhoods where their is the highest degree of poverty and segregation.

Visit http://tutormentor.blogspot.com to read full article.

Thursday, June 07, 2012 Applying Systems Thinking to Tutor/Mentor I've used this graphic to show the range of skills/actions that need to be embedded into a tutor/mentor program in order for it to have a growing impact on the lives of kids, volunteers and communities. This graphic includes a map, illustrating that great tutor/mentor programs are needed in many parts of Chicago. It also includes an inverted pyramid which illustrates steps communities need to go through to build enough support and u understanding to generate the resources that enable each program to have the skills/talents shown in the above graphic. And it shows a need to connect people from beyond poverty with the information being shared and with programs in different high poverty neighborhoods

Tuesday, June 05, 2012 Become a middle-man in making change happen! There is a mountain of research and articles available to help anyone build a PhD in understanding how concentrated poverty in big cities contributes to the high social and economic costs of poverty. However, there are not enough places where people are reading parts of this research every week and discussing it, in the same way faith groups read scripture and discuss it each week. Nor are there enough leaders using maps and graphics to illustrate a need for resources to be distributed consistently in thousands of places for many years in order to overcome the weight of poverty and help more kids move through school and into "family sustaining" jobs and careers. This concept map illustrates the many different supports all kids need as they grow up. Kids in poverty areas have fewer of these supports and in highly concentrated areas family and community have less ability to bring these supports to their neighborhoods by their own efforts and without help from others. Volunteers who become involved as mentors, tutors, coaches, etc. can become bridges, or social capital, that link the needs of the community to resources and ideas beyond the daily reach of community members and kids.

Friday, May 25, 2012 Connecting Grains of Sand into Castle on Beach If you're just a grain of sand within a small sand castle you don't have much gravity to pull all of the other grains together around your vision of the castle. Yet, if you write articles like this and post to Facebook, Twitter, and other social media on a daily basis like I do, you can draw some others together, and that's a start. The goal is that the network grows over time and that more people take roles that help make the information easier to understand, that increase the number of people looking at it, and that motivate daily actions that support individual youth serving organizations in many places. Monday, May 21, 2012 The Future of Earth - Our Children. Is NATO talking about this? With the big NATO meeting in Chicago today, and the G-8 meeting in Washington last week, I was prompted to create this graphic to suggest a type of platform that might connect those who are writing about bad news with those who are in the field leading organizations and schools that are trying to prepare youth to be the next generation of workers, along with CEOs and leaders, and those who are in decision-making seats right now and control the flow and distribution of resources needed to pay for what we do to shape our future. "how do we support all kids from the time they are born to the time they are adults able to take care of themselves" which to me means they have a job so they can raise their own children without the challenges of highly segregated poverty and the knowledge of how to learn and work collectively with others as they move through their adult lives, then the first question I propose is "what do we know of the problem and what do we know of how others are already trying to solve this problem?" If only one of the benefactors who paid for the NATO event, or who is paying for the attack advertising and political campaigns of this election year were to devote some funds to building these platforms and sustaining them for the next few election cycles, we might build a system where connected individuals work together to solve problems that governments have not figured out how to solve.

Thursday, May 17, 2012 NATO Summit - Work Behind the Scenes Leaders of NATO and aligned nations are in Chicago this week and will try to reach agreement on some big decisions. Do you think they do all the thinking, planning, brainstorming just while the leaders get together for a few days? I doubt it. I'm certain that teams of people from each country have been meeting frequently throughout the year to try to find solutions to tough problems. With that being said, what sort of system connects the foundations, business leaders, policy makers, non profits, educators, and others who are trying to figure out ways to lower the costs of poverty and prepare more young people for roles in the global economy?

Visit http://tutormentor.blogspot.com to read full article.

Thursday, May 10, 2012 Mentoring, Workforce Development, CEO Commitment Yesterday I read a paper titled The Cyclical Process of Action Research which shows how groups of people are transformed as they work together to solve a problem. This paper uses a hypothetical example of converting an industrial site into a community garden to illustrate it's ideas. As I read this, I thought of how people working to make volunteer-based tutor/mentor programs available to youth living in high poverty might go through the same process, with the same benefits. Thus, if CEOs who adopt this ROLE OF LEADERS strategy and encourage the development of employee/community teams focus on a) making tutor/mentor programs more available; b) sustaining them for many years; so that c) youth from these programs not only finish high school and go on to college and/or vocational education; d) many of them are supported by the network of adults who they have connected with in earlier years as a result of the volunteerinvolvement as tutors/mentors.

Visit http://tutormentor.blogspot.com to read full article.

Friday, May 04, 2012 Avengers, Leadership, Teams & Introverts If you're interested in creativity, leadership, teamwork and/or collaboration I encourage you to read Christopher Borrelli's review of the new "Avengers" movie in today's Chicago Tribune. This reminded me of an article I saw a while back titled 'Want To Be A Leader? Learn To Be Alone With Your Thoughts in which says William Deresiewicz, "Speaking to a plebe class at West Point, said that without solitude, its hard to arrive at thoughts that are your own, and hard to develop the moral compass and moral courage necessary to act on those thoughts." In another article, I read about how it takes 10,000 hours of practice to become an expert in any field. This blog writes about the book "Outliers", by Malcolm Gladwell, which "puts forth the premise that to be an expert in your field requires a devotion to ones craft for at least 10,000 hours." Most of what I'm thinking about relates to influencing the flow of resources to non-school tutor/mentor programs in high poverty neighborhoods. Most of these ideas can be adopted to the same problem in other social sectors. If we can influence the flow of resources and keep talent in programs longer, we increase the organizational knowledge and the ability of each organization to constantly improve their impact on kids and the volunteers who become part of these programs.

Thursday, April 12, 2012 Increase in homicides. What is root cause? An increase in homicides in Chicago from 2011 to 2012 was the focus of a feature in today's Chicago Tribune. I've written about such stories often in the past, in an effort to mobilize more support for the growth of volunteer-based tutor/mentor programs in high poverty neighborhoods. However, every time I read of a shooting, I wonder how connecting a mentor in the life of kids in that neighborhood can have a direct impact on the current level of violence. It causes me to ask, "what is the root cause" of this violence?

Tuesday, April 10, 2012 Navigating Information Overload - MOOCs Over the past year I've been learning about Massive open Online Courses (MOOCS). Rather than trying to give you a description of my own, I encourage you to view this video then visit this CHANGE.MOOC.CA site. http://youtu.be/eW3gMGqcZQc Until we find ways to connect youth, volunteers, leaders, donors and policy makers from each of these different organizations and from business, religion, philanthropy, higher education, government, media, etc. we'll never have consistent strategies reaching young people in all poverty neighborhoods with bestin-world strategies learned from this world of ideas that can be found through the Internet.

Visit http://tutormentor.blogspot.com to read full article.

Tuesday, April 10, 2012 Longer School Day in Chicago? While the Mayor, the Chicago Teacher's Union, and parent groups debate the merits, costs and content of a longer school day, what library of information and ideas is available as a central resource for everyone learning about ideas which could be applied to make what happens at school more transformative for kids? Here's a video that was shared by friends in a Facebook group that focuses on education. It shows a strategy being implemented in a suburb of Tel Aviv, Israel. http://youtu.be/6agzXa3vxKM When the media do full page stories talking about one part of the education puzzle, readers should know where to go to find more information related to this issue so they can build a more informed understanding of what is a complex problem and requires a long-term solution and the involvement of many different sectors, not just teachers, students and parents.

Tuesday, April 03, 2012 Mapping Global Environmental Crisis Discussion I've written about the need for massive online learning communities to connect people interested in poverty, education, workforce development, racial justice, etc. with information and networks of people in an on-going learning process that leads to better understanding of issues and more direct action by people, organizations and governments. I've also set up this discussion on Debategraph, thanks to the help provided by David Price, one of the coowners. I feel there's a link between what I'm focused on and what the environmentalist focus on because the ability to learn and understand issues and develop innovative solutions is at the heart of any ability of a world society to solve problems that cross borders and affect people in all parts of the world.

http://debategraph.org/mentoring_kids_to_careers

Saturday, March 10, 2012 Power of Connected Networks By creating these maps and putting links into my library I'm sharing what I learn every day with anyone who visits my web sites or reads my blogs. Based on what I've read of knowledge management over the past decade, this is a value because it saves other people time in finding this information and helps them to see how one idea or network fits together with other ideas and networks as part of a larger collective effort to help kids from poverty areas get the support each needs to move through school and into jobs. Today, I was introduced by my Facebook network to an article titled "Knowledge and Praxis of Networks As a Political Process" written by Yannick Rumpala from the University of Nice, in Nice, France. In 17 pages Dr. Rumpala provided numerous reasons for mapping and understanding networks, as part of an effort to achieve critical mass and POLITICAL influence. In one statement he wrote "A reticular vision can be a way to rethink the idea of citizenship." As I read this I saw the potential of connecting with a much larger network of thinkers and innovators who were mapping ideas, networks and processes and making this information available to support community and political involvement throughout the world.

Saturday, March 03, 2012 Re-circulating Good Ideas We all want a better future for kids, but to reach our collective goal we need to be working in strategic ways for many years, as this graphic suggests. At the base of this chart is the work of collecting, organizing and sharing information that others can use.

Thursday, March 01, 2012 Is this a Utopian Vision? This graphic represents the range of learning, mentoring and social/emotional support that most kids need to go through school and into jobs. Based on the research and articles I've read over the past 35 years, kids living in high poverty areas don't have as many of these supports, so they have more challenges making it through school and into jobs and careers that enable them to raise their own kids outside of high poverty. My dream is to help more groups begin to use the information I've aggregated, and which others have created, to learn more about poverty and how it challenges kids and schools, and to learn more about ways they and their companies, churches and universities could use time, talent and dollars to build and sustain long-term volunteerbased tutoring/mentoring and career-focused learning programs in more places.

Visit http://tutormentor.blogspot.com to read full article.

Monday, February 06, 2012 Where Good Ideas Come From Thank you to my Facebook friends for sharing this video with me. I encourage you all to take a look at it. http://youtu.be/NugRZGDbPFU

Saturday, February 04, 2012 Battle Plan for War on Poverty The graphic below shows that the "pipeline to careers" is not working well enough to reach kids at an early age and provide a wide range of mentoring and learning supports that would result in a larger number finishing high school and post high school education and entering careers in STEM or any other avocation they choose. A few years ago I created the graphic at the right, which illustrates the planning that would need to take place to enable more and better mentor-rich programs to be in neighborhoods where kids don't have an effective entry point into the "pipeline to careers" nor to that have enough effective supports along the way. As a result, we're losing kids to street violence, bad health, poor nutrition, and lack of preparation for adult jobs and responsibilities. I compare the planning process needed to support military forces in many places to that needed to make tutor/mentor programs available in many places.

Sunday, January 29, 2012 A connected world As long as we can imagine new solutions to old problems the possibilities of finding talent to help build these solutions are unlimited.

Visit http://tutormentor.blogspot.com to read full article.

Wednesday, January 18, 2012 Steps toward collective action I'm attending the National Mentor Summit next week in Washington, DC and on Monday January 30 I'll be cohosting a panel discussion of Mentoring leaders from 7pm-8:30 at First Unitarian Church, Hyde Park, IL. So how do we build on what takes place in these two events so we can influence the growth of mentor-rich programs in thousands of locations around the country and in the Chicago region? We have a society that wants quick fixes to complex problems and with people who have too little time, commitment or discipline to spend time learning about problems and solutions on an on-going basis. So how do we overcome this? Service Learning.

Monday, December 12, 2011 Connecting DropOut Resources I created the concept map below in October 2011 after attending the National DropOut Summit. I updated it today after attending another Drop-Out prevention event in Chicago last week.

Friday, December 02, 2011 What Would Drucker say about "Evidence Based"? I've been following a few blogs on Innovation around the topic "Innovation is Messy". Here are a few that you can find on a Google Search Innovation is Messy - "Innovation isnt a race. First isnt always best. Use the tools that are available right now and build on the work of others as necessary to improve incrementally." Innovation Will Always Have Messy Parts: Wisdom from IDEO's David Kelley and 3M's Bill Coyne - "... one element of the process is tougher for many people to accept than the rest -- that it is a messy and uncertain process and efforts to make the early messy stages more rational, safer, and generally neat and clean comforting get in the way of the process." Spaghetti & Social Innovation: What should stick? "the emerging field of social innovation is like being in a kitchen where the recipe for social innovation is still uncertain and perhaps always will be. While there is definitely a case for articulating core ingredients (e.g., novel solutions that tackle social problems in ways that significantly shift the way the social problems are understood and managed), a wonderful part of social innovation is the openness to variety in how that might be approached and organized. I'm interested in this because my vision of volunteer-based tutoring/mentoring requires the involvement of volunteers from beyond poverty along with youth and families living in poverty who are constantly looking for better ways to build youth career aspirations and learning habits along with a network of adults who can help youth in high poverty neighborhoods move through school and into careers where they fulfill those aspirations. Wednesday, September 14, 2011 How did Edison do it? Imagine yourself 100 years ago listening to Thomas Edison talking about the need for an electricity industry and infrastructure to enable light bulbs to be in every home, street corner and business of the country. Most people at that time did not know what a light bulb was. How many were thinking of transformers and power plants and all the thousands of little details that add up to today's giant electricity industry.

I face the same challenge. Maybe you can help me communicate this better. To me the "light bulb" is a tutor/mentor program. We still don't have a 100% proven method of connecting youth and volunteers in nonschool neighborhood tutor/mentor programs of high poverty neighborhoods in ways that result transforming the life and future of the youth, and the volunteer. We probably have a hundred different definitions of what we mean when we say "transforming the life". If you were Edison, how would you describe what you're doing and what you want others to do to help you?

Visit http://tutormentor.blogspot.com to read full article.

Friday, August 26, 2011 Managing Complexity As we move from an industrial economy to an information economy we are dealing with much greater complexity. That's what this video is describing. Read about The Complexity Challenge. In this article "Malcolm Gladwell says that if you want to shine, put in 10,000 hours." In the article above the author says "transform or don't survive". This is a critical issue for business leader. While I'm sure many companies are spending millions of dollars on training programs, learning these skills requires motivation and hands-on experiences. My motivation to learn is driven by my passion for the cause. It's never been the paycheck. If companies are looking for competitive advantage, or ways to survive in this new complex knowledge economy, why not encourage employees to learn to manage complexity through the volunteer roles they take with social sector organizations who are using the most recent business technology to support the learning and involvement of staff and volunteers in their organizations. Embed the Tutor/Mentor Institute in your organization and let us help you develop this strategy.

Wednesday, June 08, 2011 Chicago2011 Transformation - Visualization I've been writing about Mayor Emanuel's Transformation plan in a series of articles http://tutormentor.blogspot.com/search/label/Chicago2011 Throughout the plan are statements like: Chicago can only succeed as a city if every part of Chicago succeeds. And, Chicago wont move forward unless we all work to move forward together. Success will be measured by asking whether all of our communities are thriving. So I've created this graphic to illustrate how the four parts of the Transformation plan are interconnected.

I've spent over 30 years thinking about some of the issues the new Mayor seeks to address. Thus, I'd like to be able to contribute to the planning. The graphic below illustrates some of the ideas we offer.

Visit http://tutormentor.blogspot.com to read full article.

Friday, April 15, 2011 Creative Messaging. Thought-Provoking. While I've just learned to create and post videos to share my ideas, I'm awed by how much talent and creativity other people are able to apply in sharing their own ideas. This video not only has some challenging thinking, but demonstrates creative communications and visualization at its best. http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=qOP2V_np2c0#!

Monday, March 21, 2011 Another War. Another Tsunami. Another Day. We've all heard the story of the "tortoise and the hare". The rabbit gets off to a fast start then runs out of gas. The tortoise just keeps plodding along, passing the rabbit as it keeps on its own journey." In my efforts to keep Cabrini Connections available to the 7th to 12th grade teens who are part of the current program, as well as those students and volunteers who have been part of Cabrini Connections in past years, I feel like the "tortoise". In my effort to build a Tutor/Mentor Connection information-base and communications strategy that helps tutoring and/or mentoring programs like Cabrini Connections get the resources the need to operate I feel like a very slow, very old tortoise. However, the "hare" in this case is the on-going challenges we and other socialbenefit organizations face from events we cannot control.

Sunday, February 13, 2011 Using Social Media to Build Network I've used this picture before to illustrate how small and insignificant if feel as I think about how big the world is and how complex the problems are that we're all dealing with. I believed that the world changed dramatically with the Internet because of the ways it enables people from different places to connect, share ideas, and as Egypt has just demonstrated, change government structures. However, there are many challenges to overcome. This blog shows five major technology hurdles that need to be solved.

Saturday, January 29, 2011 Collaboration & Tower of Babel. Deep thinking. With the Internet we are now connected to people living in all parts of the world. With language translators available on Google and other places we can now understand each others words. Will this lead to future joint efforts to solve world problems? Is this possible? Everything I've been trying to do through the Tutor/Mentor Connection and Cabrini Connections is get people to learn from a common body of aggregated information and apply that understanding in efforts to make programs and services available that help poor kids grow up better prepared for lives out of poverty. Yet while the Internet gives us access to each other and an unlimited range of ideas, it also creates a proliferation of places with their own gravitational pull, making it more and more difficult to build the critical mass of people involved in any single place. Is this just a continuation, or 21st Century version, of The Tower of Babel Story?

Visit http://tutormentor.blogspot.com to read full article.

Tuesday, January 04, 2011 Evidence that inequality leads to shorter life spans, I encourage you to read this New York Times article by Nicholas Kristof which says "Theres growing evidence that the toll of our stunning inequality is not just economic but also is a melancholy of the soul. The upshot appears to be high rates of violent crime, high narcotics use, high teenage birthrates and even high rates of heart disease." The maps we show on this blog and at Mapping for Justice, as well as the poverty and social capital articles we point to on the Tutor/Mentor Connection sites emphasize this point. They also are tools that people who don't live in poverty can use to help create programs and services that bridge the gaps between rich an poor.

Thursday, December 30, 2010 The past. The future. The Money. a) if you believe that connecting a youth and mentor/tutor volunteer is important (and the story above shows that it is), then b) you should accept that for these connections to be made linking inner city youth with workplace volunteers, structured organizations like Cabrini Connections need to be in place close enough to where kids can participate regularly, and safe enough that volunteers and kids both will be willing to attend on a consistent basis, supported with staff who mentor youth and volunteers over the years that they are connected. c) if you accept that organized programs are needed, you should be willing to support efforts that make such programs more available to youth in all poverty neighborhoods of big cities like Chicago.

Saturday, December 11, 2010 What's your Vision? "Vision building is based on convergence, on bringing others onboard". This quote is from article from the Harvard Business Review titled Having Ideas Versus Having a Vision. http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2010/03/having_ideas_versus_having_a_vision.html Keep this idea in mind as you read articles I post over the next few weeks. Wednesday, December 08, 2010 Collective Action - challenges and opportunities In the current issue of Stanford Social Innovation Review, www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/collective_impact/ , Collective Impact authors John Kania and Mark Kramer from FSG write that collective impact happens when a group of cross-sector actors commit to a common agenda for solving a specific social problem and agree to each be accountable to a single overarching goal. Successful collective impact initiatives involve a centralized infrastructure, a dedicated staff, and a structured process that leads to a common agenda, shared measurement, continuous communication, and mutually reinforcing activities among all participants, often organized and led by a 'backbone' organization.

Visit http://tutormentor.blogspot.com to read full article.

Tuesday, November 02, 2010 Non-Profit Starvation Cycle Here's an article on the Stanford Social Innovation Review titled "Straight Talk in Mixed Company: A Plea for Across-the-Aisle Conversations about Overhead One statement says "Explicit talk between nonprofits and funders can sometimes be the rarest of commodities. I encourage you to read the article and follow the links and see if you can create a discussion circle with people from your own network. If we can't get the people who want to help poor kids out of poverty with the people doing the work, and the people collecting information that we can all learn from, how can we use scarce resources wisely?

Sunday, October 24, 2010 Decentralized Thinking Instead of trying to get millions of people in one room, to try to build a consensus, why not try to stimulate thousands of discussions in many places, all drawing from a common body of information and ideas?

Sunday, October 24, 2010 Education Reform - Big Question Which is more possible in the next decade? Improving the level of teaching quality and effectiveness at every high poverty community classroom of every public school in America. Or....Creating a system of mentor-rich non-school supports that are available to at least 25% of youth in every poverty neighborhood, and which influence student aspirations, learning habits and motivation Thursday, October 21, 2010 Expanding Capacity - Partners Needed The graphic below is one of many I've created and posted on this blog, to illustrate that our goal is to help kids living in high poverty neighborhoods have support systems, including non-school tutor/mentor programs, that help them move to jobs and careers. In the complex problems tag you can find more than 70 articles. One of the most difficult problems we face is finding the time to reflect and think about these problems, or to maintain quality information about all of the organizations offering various forms of tutoring/mentoring in Chicago. This would be a significant task for a larger organization.

Sunday, October 10, 2010 Fixing Schools. Fixing Families. Long Term Goals Improving the learning opportunities and preparing more of our young people for 21st century jobs and careers, especially those living in high poverty area, is a hugely complex problem, just like changing the social habits that have led to so many fatherless children. Let's look at Superman and work toward changing the world, but let's also look at the super men and women who lead the non profits offering tutoring/mentoring programs, and help them get the dollars and other resources each program needs to stay in the lives of the kids who already are part of these programs.

Sunday, May 09, 2010 One small voice among a constellation of issues This image of the constellation reminds me of how many people are in the world, and how difficult it is to attract just a few of them to read the ideas shared on this blog, and the links we point to. Friday, April 16, 2010 What if Mom said "go find another home" ... when you were three. Imagine if your Mom had given birth to you, then one or two years later said, "I can't support you any longer. Go find other parents." That's pretty much how life is for non profits. For programs like Cabrini Connections working to "help teens grow up" this is a huge challenge. We're constantly looking for new donors to replace old donors, or old donors to make larger donations to cover increasing expenses. We don't have the advertising that big companies have, or the high profile celebrity leaders that some charities have. We're not an earthquake, or a tsunami, which is such a large disaster that it draws donors from around the world.

Friday, February 12, 2010 Race for the Top. T/MC 2.0 It's February. It's time to start thinking of the type of tutor/mentor programs that will be available in Chicago and other cities in the 2010-11 school year. With resources scarce, it's time for volunteerbased organizations to be thinking of how they convert current tutors/mentors into leaders and capacity builders.

Sunday, December 27, 2009 Obama supports Promise Zone. How in Chicago? If you've been reading about Promise Zones, or inner city violence, or the state of Chicago Schools, and you are concerned about how the next $30 million or so of public money will be spent, I encourage you to take a look at our maps, and some of the articles we're pointing to. There are many strategies that leaders can take right now to make poor neighborhoods "neighborhoods of promise". There are many strategies that might cost millions, that may never come close to that goal.

Visit http://tutormentor.blogspot.com to read full article.

To read any article visit http://tutormentor.blogspot.com You can search for each article by the date it was written.

Saturday, November 07, 2009 Building a Non-School Strategy Over the past few day's I've reviewed the handouts I received at the Nov. 4 Drop Out Prevention Summit in Illinois. Most of the material I've looked at calls for a "school centered" strategy. However, the paper titled, Ensuring Workforce Skills of the Future: The Birth to Work Pipeline, talks about the disconnect between education strategies and workforce development priorities. One report Titled "Closing the Graduation Gap: Cities in Crisis" focuses on the 50 largest cities in America where the size of the school age population, and the size of the geography, makes the solutions more complex than what faces smaller communities. In Chicago and these other cities we need business leadership strategies that focus on other channels than public schools for connecting kids with adults who help build aspirations, and motivations, that help keep them in school, and point them at 21st century jobs and careers.

Friday, November 06, 2009 Birth to Work Pipeline - White Paper One of the papers I found as a result of attending the Nov. 4 Drop Out Prevention Summit was one titled Ensuring Workforce Skills of the Future: The Birth to Work Pipeline, written by Rick Stephens, Senior Executive Vice-President of The Boeing Company and Elane V. Scott, Leadership Strategist for Developing a Capable Workforce. The call to action says "It is vital that business, media, government, health, community and education leaders come together and align their visions as never before. No one sector has the responsibility, capability or capacity to operate alone." This is what I've been writing about, and trying to achieve for the past 15 years. My voice is just a whisper in the wilderness. Hopefully some of these business leaders will read the articles on leadership and strategy that I've written, and adopt some of these ideas in their own messages, for their own self interests. Thursday, October 22, 2009 Learn to use your network to build support your ideas While President Obama is calling for a mobilization of volunteers to solve problems in America, he's not yet showing how to build a network of support that would not only make a tutor/mentor program available in a neighborhood with high poverty and poorly performing schools, but would help it be the very best in the world at helping kids expand their networks, and use them to move successfully into schools, college, jobs and careers.

Visit http://tutormentor.blogspot.com to read full article.

Friday, October 16, 2009 Value of Visual Thinking I want to thank George Siemens for continuing to share ideas through his blog and email newsletter. You can see from this graphic, and those that you can find by reading my past articles about complex problems, that I'm a huge fan of visualizing ideas. If you're a students, or an engineer working with autocad, or a designer, and want to volunteer your talent to help us communicate these ideas, please contact us.

Sunday, October 04, 2009 Derrion Albert funeral: "No simple fix." It will take a huge effort, by faith leaders, business people and others to make comprehensive, volunteer-based tutor/mentor programs available in hundreds of locations throughout Chicago, and to keep them in those neighborhoods for many years. Isn't this the type of Olympic size vision that might unite the many diverse leaders in Chicago and it's suburbs?

Saturday, October 03, 2009 Reverse the Funding Stream In a recent post titled "Dare to think of big goals, solving big problems", I posted our strategy map, challenging us to find ways to assure that all youth born in poverty in 2010 were starting jobs and careers by age 25. To do that, I feel we need to reverse the funding stream, which is what the diagram below seeks to communicate. I feel we do this by recruiting volunteers from the business community, and beyond poverty, and empower them to be network-builders as they bond with kids and become more personally connected with the challenges inner city kids face that other kids don't. Friday, October 02, 2009 Transforming Adults Involved In Volunteer-Based Tutor/Mentor Programs Now that Chicago won't host the Olympics, can we create "gold medal" thinking about ways to help kids from poverty win their race to futures? Read on? I attend many meetings where the problems and tragedies of poverty are discussed. Almost all bring together many people with personal experience and good ideas. However, a time in the meeting comes when we talk about funding, and then we all recognize that this is a problem, then we go on and talk more about the problems, and what we could do IF we had the money. This chart shows a cycle that takes place almost every day, in hundreds of locations throughout the country. However, it may be happening with less purpose and impact in most places, than is needed to change the flow of resources to tutor/mentor programs.

Monday, September 21, 2009 Sept. 9 shooting - "kid you would wish for" Page 13 of today's Chicago SunTimes includes a photo of Corey McClaurin, a Simeon High School student, who was shot last Saturday as he sat in his car. He was described as a "diligent, well-liked student." This map shows where this shooting took place. It also shows that there are a large number of poorly performing elementary schools in the area, and no non-school tutor/mentor programs serving junior high or high school students operating near Simeon High School or anywhere in this part of Chicago.

Friday, September 18, 2009 From Simplistic Thinking to Embracing Complexity We're in a war against poverty. But we're not using all the tools and knowledge that is available to us to win this war. The T/MC does not seek to be the leader, with everyone following us. We seek to be a platform supporting the decentralized leadership and involvement of leaders throughout the Chicago region, the USA, and the world.

Saturday, September 05, 2009 Keeping T/MC a mostly FREE service I encourage you to read the analysis of the Tutor/Mentor Institute written by Bradley Troast, who is the 2009-10 NUPIP Fellow with Cabrini Connections, Tutor/Mentor Connection. http://cabrinipip.blogspot.com/2009/09/tutormentor-institute.html This diagram describes the way we've been working. Rather than be in the middle, charging a tariff for information to go back and forth between those who need help, and those who can provide it, we've moved from the middle to a third point in a triangle. Our information is intended to be used by donors, volunteers and public leaders, just as much as it is intended to be used by tutor/mentor program leaders, families, youth, social workers, etc.

Saturday, August 29, 2009 Hope and Despair in the American City Hope and Despair in the American City: Why There Are No Bad Schools in Raleigh, by Gerald Grant, is a book that is being reviewed in a discussion on Fireside Learning. The book "is a compelling study of urban social policy that combines field research and historical narrative in lucid and engaging prose. The result is an ambitious portraitsometimes disturbing, often inspiringof two cities that exemplify our nations greatest educational challenges, as well as a passionate exploration of the potential for school reform that exists for our urban schools today."

Tuesday, August 25, 2009 What's Your Strategy for Helping Inner City Kids Move Through School and into Jobs? Every day we read something about violence, poverty, poorly performing schools, or about public officials not meeting the high (or low) expectations we have for them. How many of you spend time each week creating your own blueprint for changing some of the problems we face? This graphic is a strategy map that you can find on the Tutor/Mentor Connection web site.

Wednesday, August 19, 2009 Troubled Schools, reforms tested again This week the Chicago Tribune is focusing front page and feature articles on public schools. Monday's feature was, "Troubled Schools, reforms tested again" and shows that wave after wave of reform efforts often have little impact. Charles Payne wrote about this in a book titled 'So much reform, so little change. The map created by the Tutor/Mentor Connection reinforces this. There were actually more schools added to the 2008 watch list than were removed from the 2007 list. So, what's missing? None of these articles are talking about how we expand the range of non-school places where youth can connect with volunteer tutors, mentors, technology, arts and enrichment, and caring adults who act as extra family and expanded community. This is a form of social capital referred to in research being done by the Consortium on Chicago School Research, which was presented in a series of discussions titled Is great teaching enough? Thursday, June 25, 2009 New Report on the Dropout Crisis On the Front Lines of Schools: Perspectives of Teachers and Principals on the High School Dropout Problem. By: John M. Bridgeland, John J. DiIulio, Jr. and Robert Balfanz http://www.servicelearning.org/library/resource/8724

Monday, June 15, 2009 Corporate Teams using talent and time I created this graphic to illustrate the work done behind the scenes at Cabrini Connection, which leads to on-going connections of youth and volunteers in our program. There are dozens of things to focus on every day, and too few people to do everything well. In the Tutor/Mentor Connection strategy, I focus on actions by people in businesses, faith groups, politics, etc. that would lead to programs like Cabrini Connections reaching k-12 youth in every high poverty neighborhood of Chicago, and every other big city in the country. That's an even larger challenge than building and sustaining a single program in one neighborhood.

Visit http://tutormentor.blogspot.com to read full article.

Sunday, May 31, 2009 Tutor/Mentor Conference shares ideas, builds networks On Thursday and Friday about 120 people gathered in Chicago for the 31st Tutor/Mentor Leadership and Networking Conference. Some were here for their second, third or fourth conference, such as Darryl Finch, from Milwaukee. Others, like a group of six faith leaders from Mississippi, were here for the first time.

On various blogs, and in the Tutor/Mentor Connection on Ning, and the NUTutormentor on Ning, we'll try to summarize some of what happened, and attempt to connect all of these people, and others, so that over the next six months we can do more to help tutor/mentor programs grow and expand the social capital and learning opportunities for youth in high poverty areas of Chicago, and other cities.

Friday, February 27, 2009 Creating Public Interest in Race, Poverty, Education issues The focus of today's symposium, and this year's Kids Count Forum is to go beyond traditional thinking to innovate new ways to help kids get through school and into adult lives. A variety of panel members spoke. Judy Erwin, of the Illinois Board of Higher Education, was part of the morning panel, and she said "we need to look at a continuum of learning; we need to get out of our silos". I agree.

Monday, January 05, 2009 Information visualization - use of maps If you've visited this blog more than a few times, you've seen me use maps to illustrate where tutor/mentor programs are needed, and where volunteers, donors, leaders and business partners are needed to support long-term connections of programs and volunteers with youth. Here's an interesting article on information visualization that illustrates uses of maps and other visual tools to communicate ideas. This graphic is from this Infovis article: http://www.infovis.net/index.php?lang=2 Friday, December 12, 2008 Combating Poverty through Place-Based Initiatives Yesterday I attended a forum hosted by the Chapin Hall Center for Children at the University of Chicago and the Urban Institute. The title was "LOCATION, LOCATION, LOCATION: Combating Urban Poverty through Place-Based Initiatives. Each speaker talked about how children living in places with high poverty face greater disadvantages and challenges than do youth in more affluent situations. Furthermore they all focused on the need for long-term solutions, and emphasized how difficult it is to evaluation community building efforts. Mr. Howard emphasized that donors and policy makers need to be thinking in 10 to 20 year time frames, rather than in 2-3 year grant cycles. While yesterdays event draws attention to new research and the problem of poverty, we need a comprehensive adult e-learning strategy, which engages more and more people in business, universities, philanthropy, non profits, and education with these programs. This village chart illustrates the many different sectors who need to be sharing their ideas and connecting in community problem solving.

To read any article visit http://tutormentor.blogspot.com You can search for each article by the date it was written.
Wednesday, December 03, 2008 Is Great Teaching Enough? Bonding Social Capital is the connections made between people within the community to each other. It happens when people attend faith services, go bowling together, and through other group interactions. Bridging Capital is what connects youth and families within a community with people and experiences beyond the neighborhood. In todays presentation Michael E. Woolley, M.S. S., Ph.D., University of Chicago, SSA. presented evidence showing that the more social capital and positive adults involved in the lives of inner city kids, the more likely that they will do better in school.

Sunday, November 09, 2008 What to do with $300 million donation. After the election of Barack Obama, perhaps the next biggest news in the Hyde Park neighborhood of Chicago, was a $300 million donation to the University Chicago by a wealthy alum. I read in today's Chicago Tribune Business Section that now that the University has the donation, "the hard part" is to figure out how to use that $300 million donation. Not for me. I'd use it to tap the assets of the University of Chicago, the University of Chicago Hospital and the surrounding businesses and churches and community-based organizations to build a world class network of non-school youth and career development organizations in the high poverty areas within two miles around Hyde Park and these institutions. Thursday, September 25, 2008 Save Money and Futures Yesterday the lead editorial in the Chicago SunTimes was "Save money and futures: Get dropouts into school." Thus while I agree with the concern for the 25,000 youth who have dropped out, I urge the SunTimes and others to advocate for a public and private sector funding strategy that supports kids from preschool to first job, with a variety of tutoring, mentoring, social emotional, arts and learning programs, available in non school hours and locations, not just in schools.

Friday, July 25, 2008 Focusing the Power of Faith Communities I propose that we do some reflection, with small groups of people in churches all over the Chicago region, building strategies that would use the resources of that faith community (its members, its wealth, its influence, etc.) to support the growth of comprehensive, volunteer-based K-career tutor/mentor programs in high poverty neighborhoods of Chicago and the suburbs. Here's some maps to help with that planning. The maps show the various stakeholders who could be working together to build a range of long-term, career focused tutor/mentor programs. When the marches lead to this type of thinking, planning and leadership, we can begin to see a light at the end of this terrible storm.

Visit http://tutormentor.blogspot.com to read full article.

Monday, July 21, 2008 The $20,000 question The July 20, 2008 Chicago Tribune had a front page feature asking what type of tutoring was the result of $20,000 grants provided to local groups in Chicago. It's a good time to ask, "what do we mean when we say tutor/mentor program"? What do such programs look like? How can volunteers, donors, parents and/or media shop and compare? My first advice to anyone is that if a program can't show what it is doing, why it does it, where and when it operates, and how people can get involved, using a FREE blog, or some other FREE web space, I'd be cautious about investing in it unless it could show you some plan to use the money to build an effective program.

Tuesday, July 15, 2008 Role of Engaged Universities During the June 2008 National Conference on Volunteerism I heard former President Jimmy Carter say "We have some of the best institutions of higher education in the world. Yet many of them are surrounded by slums." Our aim is to share information so that teams in universities begin to develop their own ideal of what mix of services and what type of program structure is best, and that they begin to take on a responsibility for helping such programs grow in the area around the university, with a goal that elementary school kids they work with today can be college freshmen in 6 to 12 years, and college alumni who support the university, and its neighborhood tutor/mentor programs, 15 to 20 years from now. The result of such leadership can be that instead of wealthy alumni donating $20 million for research at an area university, these same alumni might begin to divide that money into annual grants of $40,000 to $80,000 that would provide operating support to volunteer-based tutor/mentor programs in the area around the university, using the web site of the organization, and the recommendations of the university, to determine which groups to support. It also means that thousands other donors will contribute their own time, talent and dollars to support the on-going efforts of programs in different parts of the city and suburbs. Wednesday, July 02, 2008 8 year old shot. Tells docs: "When I die, I'm going to miss you." Last week was another violent week for Chicago kids. This time the story took a new twist. While in the hospital the boy said to his doctors, "You guys have been so nice to me. When I die, I'm going to miss you." While there are only five non profits in this area, there are dozens of churches who could be places for tutor/mentor programs to operate. We post maps like this so that faith leaders will begin to develop a strategic and long-term approach to the violence and poverty that plague inner-city neighborhoods. Imagine if the Cardinal, or the head of the Baptists congregations in the Chicago region developed an outreach aimed at increasing the number of church locations that hosted tutor/mentor programs, as well as the number of church locations in the city and suburbs, who were supporting these tutor/mentor programs with a regular communications strategy that ties scripture to service, volunteerism and philanthropy.

Visit http://tutormentor.blogspot.com to read full article.

Friday, June 13, 2008 Each of us has a Civic Responsibility. Marketing Solutions. This chart illustrates how leaders -- who are not directly involved in a single program -- can serve as an intermediary, connecting the people in their business, church, college, family, with the map, and thus with all of the different tutoring/mentoring programs in the Chicago region.

Wednesday, June 11, 2008 Expanding the volunteer workforce - capacity building Imagine if responsibility for resource generation moved out of the non profit sector and into intermediary organizations who want to create positive public visibility, offer extra learning and networking opportunities for high potential employees, and will benefit from a resolution to the social issue being addressed.

Tuesday, June 10, 2008 War on Poverty Requires Sophisticated Battle Plan I've often admired the genius of General George Marshall, the supreme commander of US forces in World War Two. Without the aid of a PC he and his team had to visualize a map of the entire world, know where the enemy was, and build a strategy to put US and Allied forces in all of these places so the war could be won.

Tuesday, May 13, 2008 Visualizing our goals for tutoring/mentoring, violence prevention, education, etc. For many of us, the critical question at this juncture is how to coalesce strategically around a unifying concept so that our combined efforts can break through the policy barrier that is preventing an appropriate exploration of what must happen so that all students truly have an equal opportunity to succeed at school.

Wednesday, May 07, 2008 Engaging Student Talent to Solve Social Problems During the spring 2008 school year term, two students from an Information Visualization class at the University of Indiana took on a project for the Tutor/Mentor Connection. The goal was to visualize the call to action that the T/MC is communicating via pdf presentations so that it would resonate with leaders in businesses, universities, churches, who then would apply these ideas to helping draw needed resources to volunteer-based tutor/mentor programs in all high poverty neighborhoods of big cities like Chicago. It shows how students in universities can use their talent, and their learning, to do real-world work that helps non profits achieve their important social missions. Tuesday, May 06, 2008 Understanding Inner City Violence - article For most of the people in America, inner city violence is just a sound byte on TV, or a newspaper headline. It's not something they really understand, thus it's not something that offers more than simplistic solutions. It's a complex problem. I think we've got to find ways to apply multiple pressure points to this problem. No single solution is enough. I think we've got to find ways to apply multiple pressure points to this problem. No single solution is enough.

Tuesday, April 15, 2008 Role of Leaders In an Internet World A while back I wrote about a CEO Summit that was held in New York in February. Its goal was to encourage corporate volunteers to use their talent to help build non profit infrastructure. My goal is that corporations begin to encourage people in their companies who have the skills shown on the Verizon Foundation Resource Page, to offer their talent on an on-going basis, in causes that require on-going application of time and talent to get a result.

Friday, April 11, 2008 Answers to Youth Violence - It Won't Be First Time Part of our problem is that we're working in silos, with business people talking to each other, foundation people talking to each other, university people talking to each other, and none of us are crossing these groups to interact and learn from others who are focused on same issues. There are ways to change this, using the Internet as a collaboration portal.

Saturday, March 22, 2008 Easter is about HOPE. Here's what this means to me. Every faith has high holidays where people come together and celebrate. This is Easter weekend for the millions of people who share the Christian Faith. It's a time for reflection for all of us, not just Christians. What do these religions, and these celebrations mean to us. I think it's all about HOPE.

Tuesday, March 18, 2008 Stop the Violence around Crane. Is Police State Mentality the Answer? Today and yesterday the Chicago SunTimes featured two-page stories in response to the shooting of one student near Crane High School, and the severe beatings of two others. "Change doesn't just happen. It demands gifted and persistent leadership." There are no short term answers to this. Putting an army of police around this school won't solve this problem. It's a band aid. And it won't address the same problem in the area around many other big city public schools. See Solutions for America at http://www.solutionsforamerica.org/

Thursday, January 24, 2008 Complex problems require complex solutions I think that as long as big city school systems only focus on education and school-centered solutions they will never get the outcomes we all want.

Tuesday, December 04, 2007 Follow the links. I've been building this blog for over two years now. I keep adding links to the left side of the page, to sites that I visit, which are entry points for vast areas of learning. I can't teach everything I know, or everything that is known by others in this world. I can provide a path to information I think it's important for me to know and that I hope you'll use to guild your own learning

Thursday, October 25, 2007 "Two Kids. Five Days. We're living in a crossfire." The front page story in today's Chicago SunTimes was about the senseless shooting of two more Chicago kids. One was 10. One was 13. A quote with the front page headline reads "We are becoming veterans of doing this. Too many young people are dying for stupid reasons." There is no simple, or short term, solution. Another march in the streets, and another headline in the paper, won't change habits that have built up over many years, and many generations. The only solution I know is a difficult, long road. It's one of getting informed, and getting involved.

Wednesday, August 01, 2007 Complex problems require complex solutions I encourage you to read the article posted on the Smart Communities blog today. It says "We have big problems in this country and we need the free and creative thinking of foundations, government, and nonprofits to help shape solutions. Read more at http://smartcommunities.typepad.com/suzanne/2007/08/whatworked-and.html

Friday, April 06, 2007 Recipe for Success Whos in Your Kitchen? Are you developing a program to help kids in your community? Whats your recipe? Do you have all the right ingredients? Whos helping you? Who are you learning from? Read on if youre concerned about the way your state is helping poor kids in your community move through school and to jobs and careers.

Friday, September 08, 2006 No Child Law near perfect? No way. Last week Education Secretary Margaret Spellings was quoted as saying the 2002 No Child Left Behind Law was "99.9" percent close to working properly and needed little change when it comes up for renewal next year. That's not the opinion of many, including the Center for Mental Health in Schools at UCLA: http://tutormentor.blogspot.com/2006/07/learning-supports-needed-to-make-nclb.html

Thursday, August 24, 2006 Saving Futures, Saving Dollars: Converging Thinking I've heard many people use the term "pipeline to careers", but not many map a strategy that identifies all of the different resources that are available to kids not living in poverty, which need to be made available on an age appropriate, continuous basis, to more of the kids who do live in poverty. Brian Scales, from Mentors, Inc, based in Washington, DC, sent me an article today titled, Saving Futures, Saving Dollars. You can read it at http://www.all4ed.org/publications/SavingFutures.pdf This article illustrates the huge benefit to society if we'd just find more ways to help kids born in poverty be starting jobs and careers by age 25. We're reminded of this problem at least once a day in our local newspapers, either with a story about teens killing teens, or high school test scores. Yet, nothing seems to change.

Visit http://tutormentor.blogspot.com to read full article.

Monday, May 01, 2006 Innovation, Problem Solving, Collaboration The research provided by Accenture and Compass Point provides information that non profits and for profits could be using to innovate new ways to raise and distribute revenue, ideas, talent and technology to non profits throughout the world. However, that is not likely to happen until these groups, and many others, connect with each other in on-line portals where ideas are available for innovation, where on-line meeting and discussion capacity is available, and where someone provides a blueprint, and points to maps, showing all of the places where resources are needed, and all of the existing non profits who are scurrying around like goldfish in a feeding bowl, trying to find food for their operations.

Wednesday, March 22, 2006 So, What Do We Do About It? Over the past couple of weeks Ive written about the shootings in Englewood, and expressed my concern that nothing will happen because there is no plan for engaging people from beyond poverty in this discussion in a process that creates ownership, understanding of the issues, and a dramatic increase the resources needed to build and sustain comprehensive tutor/mentor programs in poverty neighborhoods. If we want more to reduce the violence in neighborhoods like Englewood, we must provide better education and career opportunities. To do this we must increase the range of non-school programs that help kids succeed in school, stay safe in non-school hours, and move successfully to jobs and careers. The only time when work place adults are consistently available to be involved in long-term mentoring is after 5pm, when most afterschool programs are not open. Finally, it takes years to build good tutor/mentor programs and it takes a dozen years just to help a youth go from first grade through high school. It takes another 6-8 years before that youth is anchored on a career path. We can never support this process on a consistent basis in many locations if we cannot attract and keep key leaders for existing programs, let alone attract thousands more for the additional programs needed in Chicago and around the country. We cannot do this without changing the funding paradigm.

Sunday, March 19, 2006 Englewood: Less Marching + More Planning = Better Results The reason nothing will change in Englewood is that too many people are marching and calling for truces and an end to the violence, and in front of the cameras, getting face time while the cameras are focused on the tragedy in Englewood. There's nothing wrong with that, except it just creates a flash of anger. Nothing is sustained. There's no plan. Too few people are in deep thought innovating ways to build and sustain a long-term movement. Too few people are creating new ways to build involvement, ownership and public support from all parts of society, especially those who only read about poverty and tragedies like this in the paper. It will take a comprehensive vision, sustained over many years to change the conditions that make neighborhoods like Englewood feeding grounds for gangs, drugs and random violence.

Wednesday, February 08, 2006 "the difficulty of success does not relieve one of the obligation to try" Yesterday at the funeral of Corretta Scott King dozens of high profile people gave inspirational speeches calling for service to this nation and this world. I heard President Clinton while driving home. He said, "the difficulty of success does not relieve one of the obligation to try" That resonated with me. For the past 30 years I've been trying to connect volunteers and inner city kids in a process that transforms the lives of the adult and the youth. For the youth we're trying to show that there are many career opportunities beyond those modeled in high poverty inner-city neighborhoods. They are available to anyone who works hard enough and takes advantage of the support offered by volunteer based tutor/mentor programs. To the volunteer's I've tried to teach concepts of service and leadership that go beyond "giving back" or "random acts of kindness". A youth in 5th grade needs volunteer support for many years and without the help of volunteers who become leaders and help improve the capacity of a tutor/mentor program, we'll never maintain our appeal long enough to ensure that our kids reach careers. Each year, this seems like an impossible task, yet, "the difficulty of success does not relieve me of the obligation to try."

Monday, November 21, 2005 Changing NCLB standards abandons kids in poverty Did you see the article last week in the Chicago Tribune about changing No Child Left Behind (NCLB) to a standard that would measure student progress each year rather than demand that all students meet the same standards? Right now the Chicago Public School's education policy makes little strategic commitment to forming nonschool learning, mentoring and social/emotional support systems that would counter the negative influences of poverty and send kids to school every-day better prepared to learn. If the system moves to adequate yearly process there will be no motivation for school leaders to focus on what happens during the non-school hours. Is this a concern? How are you using the Internet to connect with others who have similar concerns?

Sunday, September 25, 2005 I'm up to my neck in alligators. No time to drain the swamp. Im sure this is a problem for other volunteer-based tutor/mentor programs, too. Thats why we created the Tutor/Mentor Connection in 1993. We think its always been tough to find consistent funding. Thus, were trying to create a more consistent public awareness that would draw more volunteers and donors to support tutor/mentor programs in all parts of Chicago (and in other cities), not just our program. Were also working to help business and professional groups form leadership strategies where they use their own visibility and resources to draw volunteers and donors to tutor/mentor programs. The Chicago Bar Associations Lend A Hand Program is the best example of this strategy. See http://www.lend-a-hand.net Monday, September 19, 2005 Race and Poverty in America. Will We be Talking about This Six Months From Now? Why does it take a natural disaster to get us talking about how to help the disadvantaged in America? I read through several back issues of Time and Newsweek this weekend. There are all sorts of articles talking about Race and Poverty and how we don't focus on these issues other than in times like now. I've posted articles in this blog before about the random coverage of this topic in Chicago's major papers.

Visit http://tutormentor.blogspot.com to read full article.

Friday, September 02, 2005 Disaster challenges all of us However, in six months or a year there will be another disaster that will mobilize public attention. Then the people who need Tsunami aid, and the people who need Katrina aid, will be off the front page and struggling to find the dollars needed to continue rebuilding their communities.

Friday, May 27, 2005 Memorial Day: Just Don't Forget This weekend is going to provide a visible opportunity for those who are elected leaders, and those who want to be elected leaders, to use the memory of those who died to preserve democracy to once again show what hypocrites they all are. Why do I believe this? Because while public figures and media honor those who fought and died in traditional wars, few encourage this same degree of personal sacrifice in the war on poverty, racism, and inequality in America. Random acts of kindness don't build a building and don't raise a child. Change will only occur when people learn to get involved and stay involved, often repeating the same actions over and over for many years. Saturday, May 07, 2005 It Takes More Than Caring to Lift Hard-To-Reach Kids Here's a message written by Bonnie Bracey, at BBracey@aol.com, that I feel is worth repeating: Certain schools are having success in dealing with formerly low-performing students, writes William Raspberry. But precious few school systems are showing much consistent improvement in educating the children we know to be hard to educate: children of low-income black and Hispanic households, children of single-parent school dropouts -children, in short, for whose parents school didn't work. What is hard for us to get our minds around is that school improvement is fairly easy to accomplish for children whose parents were successful in school and are enjoying some success in their lives. Friday, April 22, 2005 eLearning and Collaboration ... Connecting the Dots It's the final day of the Tech Soup forum on eLearning and Collaboration. I've enjoyed being a co-host. Many people have shared information ranging from experience in organizing on-line learning to experience in facilitating an on-line community to variations in technology available. I posted my summary comments this morning, encouraging those who attended this week, and those who might attend in future weeks to take the ideas and begin to work together to create the next generation of on-line communities. My suggestion was sort of 'anti collaborative'. I said, take this fruit and plant it in your own back yard so it can multiply. If we all wait for someone to take the lead, we'll be all waiting for a long time. Why? Because everyone in the Tech Soup forum (and in many similar forums) has a full time life responsibility that is not aligned to the goals of most of the others in the same forum.

Monday, April 11, 2005 Mentoring as a Workforce Development Strategy In a Sunday, April 10, 2005 Chicago Tribune article titled "Workforce needs polish, U.S. businesses declare", the secretary-treasurer of the New York State AFL-CIO was quoted as saying, "If we infuse education and job-training with an emphasis on 'employability skills,' then we develop workers who not only can get jobs, they can keep them as well."

Visit http://tutormentor.blogspot.com to read full article.