Can you make a $10 donation to help us keep hosting this web site, and the other resources of the Tutor/Mentor Connection? Can you encourage 10 people you know to also make a $10 donation, and to encourage 10 people they know to do so?
We're competing in the America's Giving Challenge on Facebook, where the non profit getting the most donors by Nov. 6 wins $50,000 in addition to the money from those donors.
There are daily prizes of $1000 for getting the most donors on a single day, so we're encouraging FRIDAY giving. If you're going to give $10, give it on a Friday, so we aggregate our donations and stand a better chance of winning the daily prize.
Here's our Facebook Cause page. Help us keep this Ning site available to you and others.
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Posted by Lara B Colvin on October 10, 2009 at 4:59am
There's funding for programs to mentor and get students off the streets into more supportive environments.Excerpts from the Wall Street Journal:"In response to the violence, Chief Executive Officer of Chicago Public Schools Ron Huberman last month announced a safety and security strategy that will target nearly 10,000 high-school students identified as at risk of becoming shooting victims. The project will connect some of them with mentors and part-time jobs in hopes of keeping the teens off the streets. The $30 million annual cost of the program will be paid for by federal stimulus grants.The most at-risk students have poor academic performance, miss more days of school and are more likely to be homeless and in special-education programs than other students, according to the report.The analysis found that about 80% of the shootings involved students at 38 of 89 high schools in the district.The 200 students assessed as being in the "ultra high risk" category were deemed to have greater than a 20% chance of being shot over the next two years. An additional 1,000 students had between a 7.5% and 20% chance of being shot, and an additional 8,500 had a 1% to 7.5% chance of being shot.The program aims to provide at-risk students with jobs, mentors, counseling services and to replicate the less-tense atmosphere of schools with less violence, Mr. Huberman said. The plan also aims to station police and school security personnel along certain streets to provide students safe passage to school. Those passages are not in place yet."Violent Deaths Shock Chicago Into ActionOfficials Move to Identify at-Risk Children, Implement Programs to Make Classrooms, Neighborhoods Safer* Comments (114)By DOUGLAS BELKINWSJ October 7, 2009The videotaped beating death of a 16-year-old boy who wandered into a street brawl is focusing attention once again on how dangerous it is to be a teenager in Chicago.The city is instituting a program to monitor and help the thousands of students it considers at risk of violence. The high murder rate has marred the city's image, and some have speculated that it played a role in Chicago's loss in its bid to host the 2016 Summer Olympic Games.Chicago brawlAn image from a video of the Sept. 24 attack on Chicago's South Side that left Derrion Albert dead. Four teenage boys have been arrested.U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan and U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder are expected to meet with local elected officials, students and parents Wednesday in Chicago. The trip signals that President Barack Obama's administration may be taking a more active role in seeking solutions to a violence problem that has left 45 students dead in the past 12 months.Derrion Albert, 16 years old, was beaten to death seven blocks from his school last month. A recording of the attack was posted online and widely viewed. Police have arrested four teenage boys in connection with the incident.Between September 2008 and September 2009, 398 Chicago students were shot, said Monique Bond, a spokesman for the district. So far this school year, four students have been slain.In response to the violence, Chief Executive Officer of Chicago Public Schools Ron Huberman last month announced a safety and security strategy that will target nearly 10,000 high-school students identified as at risk of becoming shooting victims. The project will connect some of them with mentors and part-time jobs in hopes of keeping the teens off the streets. The $30 million annual cost of the program will be paid for by federal stimulus grants."This is costing a tremendous amount of money, but for this group of students we believe are at substantial risk of being shot, we don't have a choice," Mr. Huberman said.The high murder rate was an embarrassment to the city as it pursued a bid to host the Olympics. A satirical campaign for an Olympic mascot of a chalk outline of a dead body -- such as those found at crime scenes -- earned widespread local attention in the run-up to the International Olympic Committee's vote for a host city. The Rev. Jesse Jackson speculated that the wide circulation of the beating video could have influenced the decision to drop Chicago in the first round of voting last week.Mr. Huberman, a former police officer who was named CEO seven months ago, said the security plan was created by analyzing profiles of all the students shot over the past five years.The most at-risk students have poor academic performance, miss more days of school and are more likely to be homeless and in special-education programs than other students, according to the report.The analysis found that about 80% of the shootings involved students at 38 of 89 high schools in the district.The 200 students assessed as being in the "ultra high risk" category were deemed to have greater than a 20% chance of being shot over the next two years. An additional 1,000 students had between a 7.5% and 20% chance of being shot, and an additional 8,500 had a 1% to 7.5% chance of being shot.The program aims to provide at-risk students with jobs, mentors, counseling services and to replicate the less-tense atmosphere of schools with less violence, Mr. Huberman said. The plan also aims to station police and school security personnel along certain streets to provide students safe passage to school. Those passages are not in place yet.Mr. Albert was heading home from school when he walked into a fight between two groups of students; one from the Altgeld Gardens section of the city -- where Mr. Obama was once a community organizer -- and the other group made up of students from the neighborhoods closer to the school.The shaky video of his slaying shows a swarm of teenage boys in a melee that suddenly zeros in on Mr. Albert as he is hit on the head from behind with a long, wooden railroad tie. Mr. Albert falls to the ground, stands up and is punched by a second boy. He falls again, and when he rises a third boy hits him on the head with another plank.On Tuesday a pile of stuffed animals and flowers memorialized the spot where the teen fell.
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Television viewers will notice the week of October 19 – 25 that their favorite characters and actors are promoting volunteerism to a level never before seen in the entertainment industry.
The effort is part of a multi-year initiative from the Entertainment Industry Foundation (EIF) titled "I Participate," which will encourage Americans to embrace a new way of thinking about service and aims to persuade millions of people to volunteer regularly. For more information about "I Participate," visit http://www.iparticipate.org.
Are you ready to use this visibility to talk about volunteer opportunities in your own program? Are you ready to talk about the philanthropy needed to support effective volunteer-involvement? If you use this media attention effectively, it can help you have a much more successful November and December fund raising effort, and this can enable you to support your youth and volunteers better in 2010.
Do you have good ideas on this? Why not do a workshop at the November Conference in Chicago, or share your ideas on a blog, or in a discussion forum such as this one.
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On my blog at Tutor/Mentor Connection I post graphics like the one below, to help explain concepts that I feel would result in more resources for tutor/mentor programs, thus, more and better programs reaching more kids. The one below illustrates a goal of educating donors and volunteers so they are visiting forums like this, and our web sites, to learn what we do and decide who, and how, to help.
The chart below illustrates how this might be achieved, by recruiting volunteers from the workplace, and from beyond poverty, supporting them with constant coaching, and then educating them about the issues of poverty which are the reason the tutor/mentor programs is needed in the first place. Some of these volunteers can grow to become leaders who recruit other volunteers, donors, and business and political support. Read the blog article
Now imagine how lively this forum would be if each member was posting blog articles, and videos, with their own drawings and explanations of their own visions for building the type of support needed for many tutor/mentor programs to operate on every continent, with consistent support for all of them. As you struggle to visualize this, or as you ask the youth and volunteers in your programs to do this, the process of creating a diagram builds greater clarity of purpose to the people to take this step, not just for those who view the diagrams and stories.
Give it a try. I look forward to looking at your own blueprints and strategies.
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