Connect knowledge, volunteers, youth and make a difference.

Ken Gillgren's Comments

Comment Wall (2 comments)

At 4:08pm on April 30, 2009, Daniel Bassill said…: O

This graphic illustrates the goal of T/MC and how I hope others who visit this forum will act. It shows that each of us have talents and networks that we can draw into the forum and connect with each other. In many ways this is like Community Weaving, but it's aimed at organizational connections, not just individuals sharing time and talent. It's also aimed a creating an infrastructure of on-going support to help comprehensive, volunteer-based tutor/mentor programs operate in high poverty areas of Chicago and other cities. Please share this with your networks in Seattle. Maybe you can attract support from Microsoft or others who I can't reach from here.

At 11:05am on April 26, 2009, Daniel Bassill said…: Hi Ken, thanks for joining the group. I hope you'll use your communications and networking schools to help us draw together people from Chicago and other cities who want to help connect inner city kids with well-organized volunteer-based tutor/mentor programs. For Chicago, we maintain a Tutor/Mentor Program Locator database of programs and a web page with links to more than 200 different programs. You can see these at http://www.tutormentorconnection.org

Someone in Seattle, Milwaukee and other cities would need to build this database for intermediary groups to provide the same services we do for Chicago, but that's possible.

With the database, we can begin to recruit leaders in business, faith groups, colleges and hospitals to do the advertising and communications that draws volunteers and donors and youth to these programs on a more consistent basis.

As you work in this community, I hope you'll also share what we're doing with the different Community Weaving groups, so that people interested in volunteer-based tutoring/mentoring will visit this forum, while others will borrow some of the ideas for work in other social benefit sectors.