Introduction and Question

[Dan Bassill]

Tamara,

To me the best "journal" for publishing the information you are gathering is the web sites you are teaching kids to develop.  The internet bypasses the traditional journals and book publishing barriers.  As we teach kids to post imovies and poetry we need to teach them to do reasearch, in libraries and on web sites, so they can begin to build documentaries.  As they go from entertainment to "edutainment" they can begin to go through the thinking of a) identifying a problem; b) identifying solutions; c) developing an action plan; d)using the internet to share the action plan and to recruit help to implement it as solutions.

That means you (and we) need to teach youth to not only build web pages, but to consider the content they might put on those pages. Most importantly, we need to teach them to use list serves, networking, public awareness events and other creative and traditional marketing to draw visitors to their web sites and their messages.

In our own program in Chicago we're teaching kids to build videos and write journals. We put pices from this into our web site and our newsletters and we're building the capacity to teach kids to put their work on-line.  We also create adult-driven events which area already bringing visitors to our web site where we post our message and invitations to 'get involved'.  For instance, during August visitors to www.tutormentorconnection.org can read about the Chicagoland Volunteer Recruitment Campaign, and find locations where more than 80 programs will be recruiting volunteers on Sept. 7th, 8th and 9th.  They can also find information about a book about Cabrini-Green which was written by a long-term volunteer and students from our progam.

Anyone on this list has the potentil to duplicate this, using your web site to post more information than any of us would want to read in one email. We need to learn to use our technology to network and share information and draw resources to us better than what I see now at most organization web site.  If we do that we'll begin to compete with the daily papers and the daily TV for visitors and partners in our work.

I'll look forward to reading your research at your web site "journal".

Dan Bassill
Cabrini Connections
Tutor/Mentor Connection
1111 N. Wells, Suite 503
Chicago