Blogs

This is one of many concept maps I've created to visualize the commitment I and other leaders need to make to help youth in all high poverty neighborhoods of a city get the support systems they need to more successfully move through school and into careers.  While you can click through the nodes on this map, to other maps, I created this library of concept maps, to show the wide variety that are available.

The primary value of this Ning community has been to support interns who are looking at my maps and visualizations, then creating their own videos and graphics to communicate the ideas in different ways.  Visit this group and you can see work done since 2007. 

  This is one of many visualizations that have been done. At this page you can see a collection of many projects done in the past. 

The only way these ideas will reach more people is for members of this group to enlist youth in their own community, and teach them to create their own interpretations of these ideas. If you're not in Chicago, just change the maps and focus the ideas on the needs of youth where you live. 

If you're already doing this, please share links to your projects and maps.

This is a graphic created by Jawon Koo, an intern from IIT who has been with Cabrini Connections Tutor/Mentor Connection for about 3 weeks. It's part of an animation, converting a T/MC article into another format that we hope will create greater understanding, and thus more response. Jawon is working with another intern, Eunsoo Lee. In a couple of days there should be a new version of this to review.

The purpose of the blogs, web site, and forum is to share ideas, and to build greater public awareness, so that tutor/mentor programs in Chicago and around the country are more consistently supported by volunteers, donors, media, etc.

Creating public awareness is difficult. Yet if we're creative about it, we have some opportunities.

What if teams of students from universities and high schools all over the world were each converting one of the T/MC essays into an animation, and were submitting their work to this forum, where we could devote a group space to showing how each team has interpreted our idea? We could create a panel of judges, and recognize one project as a national, or international champion. All of the projects would be available to any user, to help them educate leaders in their own community, to provide more consistent support to their own youth.

Faculty from several universities are on this forum. What do you think? Could you recruit teams of students from design and art and journalism schools to do projects like our interns have been doing? It would be a great teaching and learning opportunity, as well as a way to create low-cost public visibility for the work we're all doing.

This graphic is one of many that I've posted on Ning, and on the Tutor/Mentor Institute site, and in my blog. It was developed as the result of many years of leading a tutor/mentor program, and of spending solitary hours thinking of ways to make what I do more effective.

I found an article today titled "Solitude and Leadership: If you want others to follow, learn to be alone with your thoughts", by William Deresiewicz

I encourage everyone to spend time reading this, thinking of how it applies to you in your role with the Tutor/Mentor Connection, or with your own organization. Then, make an effort to apply the recommendations in your own efforts to learn more about where volunteer-based tutor/mentor programs are needed, the variations between these programs, and the ways you can adopt ideas from one place and apply it to many other places. Learn more about what it takes to operate a program, and turn it into a world-class program. Learn what it takes to sustain the involvement of volunteers, donors, youth, for many years, or till we reach the ultimate goal of more youth finishing school ready for 21st century jobs and adult responsibilities.

Part of your reading should be the articles we write, but most of it should be the books and articles that other people write, which we post in the Tutor/Mentor Library.

You can't learn this all in a day, and your reflections and ideas will only grow stronger if you apply this learning over a life time. If you're an adult, it's not too late to apply this thinking. It's not too late to try to teach young people who you mentor to build these habits.

This is the way we create the future we want.