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This is a graphic that I include in many articles I write, illustrating the role individuals can take in reaching out to people they know to draw them to information we share on our web sites and to tutor/mentor program locations where they can be volunteers,  leaders, donors, etc.  I am speaking to a group of students from Governors State University tonight (4/5/2011) and at Loyola University  on Thursday (4/8/2011) and created this pdf essayto try to illustrate the ways they and others can help tutor/mentor programs grow.

While my mission and focus is on tutor/mentor program growth, these ideas can be applied to build more consistent and long-term support of organizations involved in any form of social problem solving where resources need to be consistently available in order for organizations to build the strength and knowledge to begin to have an impact on those issues.

I encourage anyone who reads this to share it. I also encourage you to create your own leadership essays so you can share your own thinking on these topics.  If you want to volunteer time and talent to help convert this idea to a video or a graphic animation we welcome your involvement.

I'm trying to create a visualization that any youth serving organization might be willing to use to visually communicate what time of day they reach youth, what age range they serve and what types of learning and mentoring activities are offered.

This is what I've done so far.  This could be downloaded and colored in by hand, then scanned and uploaded as a jpg. Perhaps it could be imported into photo shop or a paint program and colored in.  Or perhaps someone could create a graphics program that enables people to fill in this information via their computer, then produce a jpg that could be posted on their web site.

If we found a way to make this easy to create, and to motivate a larger number of organizations to put this on their web sites it might have two benefits. Programs might see activities that are included in work of other programs and try to duplicate that in their own programs. Donors might begin to differentiate between school based, non school, volunteer based, etc. and use this information to support fund raising or volunteer involvement decisions.

The collection of information about programs, based on what they do, needs to also be part of a matrix showing who they serve, and where they are located.  Programs operating in big cities have a different costs of operating framework than programs in smaller communities.

I don't know of anyone collecting and analyzing this information.

In the next class of interns I'll offer this as a project.  If anyone viewing this would want to create their own version and share it, please do.

On Monday I hosted another Tutor/Mentor Leadership and Networking Conference in Chicago. This was the 40th in the past 20 years. I'm still going through attendance information, evaluations, etc. but it looks like about 105 attended.
One participant, Changyue An,  is a graduate student from IIT in Chicago. Here's some information he shared from a workshop titled "Mentoring Urban Youth"

1.  Two important principles we must remember

• Young people do not see what you see.
• If they are gangs, you must see them as individuals.

 2.  The Approach to be a good tutor/mentor

• What you see might not be what others see.
• What you experience plays an important factor on how you react and handle situations.
• Gained knowledge allows you to make certain judgments about situations and/or people.
  
  

 3.  Build Methodology-Relationship Building

• Diversity
• Respect
• Open & Honest Communication
• Trust
• Teamwork

 4.  M&M’s-another way to be a good tutor/mentor

• Meet youth where they are at
• Make a connection
• Master their needs and interests
• Maintain positive relationship
• Manage their trust
• Motivate them to positive programs

If any of you attended the same workshop, please add your own thoughts. If you would like to post a review of other workshops you attended, or of the overall conference, I encourage you to do that, too.

In the Groups section of the forum one sub group shows interns from universities working with me every six months to create strategy visualizations.  In this album, and this album, you can see photos from previous conferences, which were taken by interns who attended those. 

These illustrate roles  young people can take as intermediaries, and communicators, using their own skills to draw attention to events, activities and ideas.  Youth from many schools could be doing this and the result would be greater attention for social issues like tutoring/mentoring of youth, and a greater flow of resources from those who could help tutor/mentor programs operate in different cities.

This is a graphic that I  posted on my blog last Friday. It's intended to illustrate how we want leaders and volunteers to develop strategies that not only say "we have a problem" but also say "go here" to learn more about the problem, and go here, and here" to choose organizations that you can support with time, talent and/or dollars.

Since most of the 300-plus members of this forum work with non profits and NGOs that need money to operate, the more people who visit this forum to learn what we each do, and to help us with resources, the greater will be our  ability to succeed in our work.

Thus, if every three months you send out an email or some other correspondence pointing to something that is going on in this forum, in Chicago, or in your own city/country, you can increase the number of people who hear this message and respond to it.

If we can teach our friends, volunteers, family, youth and others to also send such messages, we can dramatically increase the number of people who are learning ways to help us.

If we can teach media, celebrities, CEOs, ministers, elected officials, etc. to do this, they can draw more resources into high poverty neighborhoods on a consistent basis, and do more to help effective non profits and social services do good work in many places.

Anyone can take the role of teacher, or evangelist, to spread this message and help others accept it and adopt it. Give it a try.

This is the first page of this PDF volunteer recruitment presentation. If you're trying to draw volunteers and donors to your non-profit, it will help if people in business, media, religious groups, etc. are using their own media to encourage volunteers and donors to find you.

You can save this image to your computer, and then put it in your own blog, with your own message. If enough people do this in August we can increase the number of volunteers and donors who are supporting us in September and beyond.

I created a set of "blog exchange" links on the Tutor/Mentor Connection web site. If you use this image in a blog story, why not add a link to the story in the T/MC site. As we aggregate these we can learn from each other, and build more attention for each other's work.