[YL] Tutor/Mentor Programs Celebrate End of School Year and Point to 2005-06
Dan Bassill
tutormentor2 at earthlink.net
Wed Jun 8 13:40:20 EDT 2005
When I stand before God at the end of my life, I would hope that I would
not have a single bit of talent left and could say, "I used everything you
gave me."
Author: Erma Bombeck
Tutor/Mentor Connection NEWS
Linking ideas, programs and people to help inner city kids. A Program of
Cabrini Connections.
June 12 , 2005
T/MC REPORT ON-LINE, Issue #31
June Graduations are the beginning of the 2005-06 school year
Tutor/Mentor Leadership and Networking Confeerences
e-conferences
On-line Volunteer and Donor Databases
MY Hero Awards - Chicago Bar Association/Foundation Lend-A-Hand Program
June 14th Seminar- Good Business and Business Ethics
President's Message - Building a tutor/mentor program community
This email newsletter is being sent to people who are volunteer
tutors/mentors, leaders, staff, board members of tutor/mentor and youth
development programs. It is also being sent to people who are donors or who
lead business, university, hospital or philanthropy organizations. Our goal
is to connect every stakeholder in one on-going learning network so that
ideas are shared and resources distributed in ways that help youth in every
poverty neighborhood get the resources then need to move from poverty to a
job/career. Please share this information with others in your personal and
professional networks.
If you would like to be removed from this email list, just reply and say
"remove".
June Graduations lead to ....
On May 19th Cabrini Connections celebrated the end of its 12th consecutive
year of tutoring/mentoring youth in the Cabrini Green neighborhood of
Chicago. More than 150 parents, volunteers and students attended. Awards
were given for grades, attendance, citizenship and recognition was given to
the three seniors who will graduate from high school in June, after 5 and 6
consecutive years with Cabrini Connections. The dinner was hosted by our
six juniors who as seniors next year will be our student leaders. We expect
to have 85% of our 69 students back with us in the 2005-06 school year, thus
while we celebrated the end of one school year we also challenged our
volunteers, students and parents to contribute time, talent and money to
help us make sure we could continue the program in the coming year. How
many other Tutor/Mentor Programs are holding similar celebrations in May and
June? How many have a strategy in place to convert volunteers and students
into leaders who help sustain a program from year to year?
Between April 18 and May 23 the Tutor/Mentor Connection co-hosted three
eConferences and a face to face conference in Chicago. Workshops focused on
elearning, collaboration and strategies for building and sustaining
volunteer-based tutor/mentor programs. More than 140 people participated in
the Chicago conference and another 100 participated in various econference
workshops. Many of the eConference workshops have been archived. You can
review them by going to the eConference page of
http://www.tutormentorconference.bigstep.com
What do we mean by elearning and collaboration. We try to model that at the
Tutor/Mentor Connection. We've been building a database of tutor/mentor
stakeholders since 1993. On our web site we post links to other tutor/mentor
programs in Chicago and to tutor/mentor networks and research organizations
in other cities. We encourage our staff and volunteers to constantly
compare what we do to what others are doing. Our goal is to challenge
ourselves to constantly improve. We can do that by learning from others. By
posting this information on our web sites we make it possible for people
from hundreds of other programs to learn from the same information. We've
had more than 120,000 visitors to our web sites. We don't require that
someone links back to us, but we tell people that we can only increase
traffic to their site if they share part of the work of building public
awareness and increasing traffic through the internet to multiple programs.
Below are some of the Chicago programs with web sites in the Program LINKS
section of http://www.tutormentorexchange.net. Some web sites do a better
job of showing their tutoring/mentoring mission than others. If you have a
web site, compare your site to these. Does your web site shout that you
offer a tutor/mentor program and that you need volunteers and donors to help
you? If not, you may not be getting the help from your web site, or the
Tutor/Mentor Connection, that you need.
Chicago Youth Program
http://www.chicagoyouthprograms.org/
Family Matters Chicago
http://www.familymatterschicago.org/awards.html
Inspired Youth Tutoring Program
http://www.geocities.com/inspiredyouthchicago/overview.htm
Working In the Schools http://www.witsontheweb.org/
Cabrini Connections http://www.cabriniconnections.net
Cabrini-Green Tutoring Program http://www.cabrinigreentutoring.org/
East Village Youth Program http://www.evyp.org
Highsight - http://www.highsight.org/
Horizons for Youth - http://www.horizons-for-youth.org/
Midtown Educational Founation http://www.midtown-metro.org
Youth Outreach Services http://www.yos.org
If you operate a program in the Chicago region or Northwest Indiana, you can
add a link on the http://www.tutormentorexchange.net your web site .
If you are not in the Chicago region, does someone in your city maintain a
page where tutor/mentor program links are aggregated? By building a master
list of tutor/mentor programs we are able to invite Chicago programs to work
together to increase visibility for all tutor/mentor programs. We are also
able to invite business and professional groups, such as the Lend A Hand
Program at the Chicago Bar Association (http://www.lend-a-hand.net) to
promote tutoring/mentoring and raise money for tutor/mentor programs. Our
goal is that hundreds of businesses will learn to put links on their web
site that point to tutor/mentor directories in the communities where they do
business. If tutor/mentor programs in other communities share this goal,
it's more likely to become a reality than if it is just the goal of one
tutor/mentor program in a huge city like Chicago.
Do you have a tutor/mentor blog? Do you know of a web site that aggregates
tutor/mentor blogs? This is a way to share the experiences of your program
in a personal and informal way. It's an inexpensive form of public
awareness building. Here's the Tutor/Mentor Blog:
http://tutormentor.blogspot.com. If you have a tutor/mentor blog, please
send your ULR to tutormentor2 at earthlink.net.
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Volunteer Recruitment Collaboration - If you would like to participate in
an on-line planning group focused on August/September and year-round
Volunteer Recruitment go to:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/volunteer_recruitment/
ADD A LINK to Your Leadership; Help recruit volunteers for local
Tutor/Mentor Programs
While many people talk about creating pipelines to careers, few have
strategies to support that long-term process. One strategy is to link
leadership speeches and appearances to tutor/mentor web site directories.
Teach your board members, clergy, elected leaders, sports stars and heroes
to add a LINK to tutor/mentor or volunteer service web sites on their own
web pages. Teach media to add links to news stories. This is an no-cost
strategy to increase traffic to tutor/mentor web sites.
Below are on-line volunteer match services that business and professional
people might search to begin a partnership with tutor/mentor programs in
Chicago or in other cities.
State of Illinois - Volunteerism & Community Service
http://www.illinois.gov/volunteer/
Chicago's Community Resource Network http://www.chicagovolunteer.net
http://www.ServeNet.org
http://www.volunteermatch.org
http://www.NetworkforGood.org
Use the Program Locator at www.tutormentorexchange.net to find Chicago
Tutor/Mentor Programs
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Attention Chicago Area Tutor/Mentor Programs.
The Abraham Lincoln Marovtiz Lend A Hand Program of the Chicago Bar
Association was created to raise visibility in the Chicago Legal Community
that helps recruit volunteers and raise dollars for volunteer-based
tutoring/mentoring programs in Chicago. Since 1995 more than $375,000 has
been distributed as small annual grants to Chicago volunteer-based
tutor/mentor programs. The 2005 grants will be distributed in December.
Grant applications can be found at http://www.lend-a-hand.net.
Visit the web site and click into the Testimonial section to see how members
of the Legal Community are showing support for tutoring/mentoring in
Chicago. Here's an example:
"As a member of the Executive Board of the Lend-A-Hand Program, I encourage
you to personally get more involved in tutoring/mentoring and to get your
corporation involved as well. Getting involved with tutoring and mentoring
the future generation of our country is one of the true "win-win"
propositions out there - there are really no downsides to involvement! I
know that I have personally received many rewards from my involvement in
various efforts working with school-aged children."
-- Daniel Cotter, Past CBA YLS Chair & Sr. Counsel Unitrin Serv. Co.
If you're a lawyer involved in tutoring/mentoring, you're encouraged to tell
your own story, using the LAH Blog on the LAH web site, or by registering to
be part of the LAH email network.
One event that encourages lawyers, judges and law firms to get involved with
volunteer-based tutor/mentor programs is the annual My Hero Awards. This
years Annual My Hero Awards Luncheon will be held at the Standard Club in
Chicago, starting at 11:30 am, on July 28, 2005.
We need your help!
Please help us identify the lawyers and judges who mentor or volunteer as
leaders or board members for your tutor mentor agencies. If you nominate
members of the legal profession who have made a difference to your agency
you help build visibility that will encourage other people from the legal
community to also get involved. You also help the Lend A Hand build a
network of lawyers, judges and law firms who are already involved in
tutor/mentor programs throughout the Chicago region. This will help them
increase the money raised and awarded to tutor/mentor programs in the annual
grants program.
Deadline for submission of nominations is June 20, 2005 so please act
quickly to identify a volunteer and submit your nomination. A PDF of the
nomination form is attached. Visit http://www.lend-hand.net to find more
information about the luncheon.
For more information about the Hero Awards or the Lend A Hand Program,
contact Karina Ayala-Bermejo, Executive Director , The Abraham Lincoln
Marovtiz Lend-A-Hand Program, 312-696-4440
Not in Chicago? Ask your local Bar Association to create a Lend A Hand
Program to support tutor/mentor programs in your community!! Encourage
Accountants, Engineers and Health Care Professionals to do the same!!
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June 14th Forum at University of Chicago Gleacher Center: Good Business:
The Dialogue Between the Spirit and the Letter of Business Ethics
Corporate scandals have fostered new interest in business ethics. What are
the big issues? Should businesses have ethical commitments beyond complying
with the law? Why are ethics strategically relevant? How do good ethics
affect financial results, and does that matter? Can good ethics energize
changes in businesses and how they relate to their stakeholders? Our panel
will explore these issues and lead our discussion. Visit this web link for
a complete event description and registration details:
https://alumniservices.uchicago.edu/events/EventView.asp?ID=556&Private=N
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President's essay
Ask not what a tutor/mentor program can do for you. Ask what you can do for
a tutor/mentor program.
While many schools have not held year-end graduations, it's not too soon to
be thinking of ways tutor/mentor program networks might work together to
recruit volunteers during August and September, or to raise visibility that
recruits more private sector donors to support tutor/mentor programs
throughout a city.
Mentoring is a process. It takes years for a program to build a corps of
dedicated volunteers and the trust of youth and families. It takes 12 years
for a first grade youth to finish high school and another 4-8 years before
that youth might be anchored in a job and career. Unfortunately, if that
youth lives in a segregated, high poverty innercity neighborhood there are
too few programs to support this process and not enough dollars to support
the consistent growth of volunteer-based tutor/mentor programs or networks
like the Tutor/Mentor Connection.
Each of us working alone and in competition with each other has limited
ability to raise the money we need from year to year to sustain our
programs. However, working as a network that has common goals we have the
potential to change the way business supports volunteer involvement in
tutor/mentor programs. We have a chance to influence workplace fund
raising. And we have a chance to influence the giving decisions of the baby
boomer generation as they pass on their wealth to the next generation.
Programs that have strategies to recruit volunteers from business and
professional groups, and that convert some to leaders, have a strategy for
capacity building. A tutor/mentor program works when it's community of
students and volunteers and parents work together to help the kids reach
their potential. Staff in such programs are really conductors of a diverse
orchestra. Does your program work this way? Are your volunteers and
alumni thinking of ways they can help sustain your tutor/mentor program?
What are you doing to encourage this?
The Tutor/Mentor Conferences are a great example of people working together
for a common purpose. Every speaker who delivered a workshop in the
conferences volunteered his/her time. The Conference was co sponsored by
the Children & Family Justice Center at Northwestern University Law School,
and held at the Law School Guests and speakers came from Canada, California,
Texas, Michigan, Indiana, Iowa, Illinois, Wisconsin, etc. to network and
share ideas with peers.
The May 6-12 econference was hosted by the Digital Workforce Education
Society at the City Colleges of Chicago (http://www.alado.net/econference).
The May 23 eConference was hosted by the Technology Department at
IndianaUniversityPurdueUniversityIndianapolis (IUPUI). Volunteers created
the T/MC web sites and volunteers from Cabrini Connections help raise the
money to pay for the conferences and the other services of the Tutor/Mentor
Connection. Volunteers are leading the Lend-A-Hand Program.
The Tutor/Mentor Connection is just a conductor in this process. We send out
an invitation via this email newsletter and our web sites and invite people
to participate. I've done this for more than 30 years. We succeed because
others share a commitment to the same goals and some are willing to make
time to help.
We do this because we have formed a bond with the young people who
participate in our programs. We're proud when we see their accomplishments
and happy to celebrate each year that they have allowed us to be part of
their lives. However, we're frustrated that it is so difficult for us to
maintain their participation and that we cannot compete as effectively as we
need to against the negative influences of concentrated, inner-city poverty.
We're frustrated to see so many dollars wasted in so many public and private
actions that don't contribute to a sustained growth of good tutor/mentor
programs, while receiving so many rejection letters saying there is not
enough money to fund our good programs.
There are more than 135,000 children in Chicago attending poorly performing
schools. Each one who is able to participate in a comprehensive,
volunteer-based tutor/mentor program has a brighter chance to succeed in
school and be in a job/career by age 25.
If these were your kids, how far would you be willing to extend yourself to
help them? For volunteers and leaders who have become part of tutor/mentor
programs, these are our kids.
The next Tutor/Mentor Conference and eConference series will be in November
2005. We need to be doing a lot of networking and creative thinking to
assure that all of the programs celebrating graduations this spring are
still active and full of volunteers and students next November. I hope
you'll join us.
----Dr. Daniel F. Bassill, President, CEO of Cabrini Connections and the
Tutor/Mentor Connection
Visit my Blog at http://tutormentor.blogspot.com
____________________________________________________________________________
You are receiving this email newsletter because of your demonstrated
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