Blogs

As the title of this post indicates, this is my first week with T/MC, and as such, I will begin my blog posts with an introduction to who I am as well as the networks that I am currently involved with.  For starters, I am an intern from the Adler School of Professional Psychology where I am a first year student in the Marriage and Family Therapy program.  This program emphasizes a systematic way of thinking, and to identify problems not just individually, but to be able to look at them on a larger scale, as there are typically many different individuals that are involved with any problem.  After doing some research into the OHATS program, I find that the thinking behind it is much the same as a systemic way of problem solving, in the sense that instead of focusing on the problem using many, individual groups, OHATS is attempting to create a mesosystem that encompasses these groups and unify them to solve a common societal issue.  I had never realized that my coursework would so closely mirror the ideology of T/MC.

With that revelation being stated, I will continue on with my introduction.

I completed my undergraduate work in Psychology and Biology at the University of Illinois in Urbana/Champaign in 2004.  I became a member of the Kappa Sigma fraternity while attending the university, and still associate with that organization to this day.  While attending the university, I worked for the America Reads/America Counts program, tutoring children with learning disabilities in a local elementary school, which ultimately inspired my interest in working with T/MC Cabrini Connections.  I currently live in the Rockford, IL area, where I have been involved through my previous employment via DCFS with the school systems there. I was a case manager for specialized foster children, and worked closely with a foster parent alliance group that met weekly to discussthe needs of the foster children in the area.  At that time I had wondered if other foster care programs in the area had similar foster parent groups, and if so, what were they discussing?  Yet another instance where a more systemic way of addressing the problems they faced could have been useful, as I'm sure they were not unique to this particular group of foster parents.  Many of these problems did focus around the education of the foster children, as they were typically falling through the cracks with few people to advocate for them, and few resources to utilize.

These past experiences have gotten me excited to work for a program such as this one, and hopefully I will be able to contribute and to spread the word to others about this program.

Below is my network map of resources, but it is the first one I have ever made, so I am sure that are details that I have overlooked and links that I have missed.

JoeNetwork.ppt

As we enter 2011 the economy is still a mess and the competition for resources to fund non profits continues to grow. Thus, we need to be more creative, think smarter, and keep learning from the wisdom of others.

This article is one that I encourage you all to read. It talks about how your Twitter, email, or Facebook post can generate more response if it can connect emotionally with the reader.

I'm not smart enough to figure out all the different ways to make our messages appeal in this way to all of the various people we're trying to reach, but the collective talent of the people who are members of this Ning group, and the people they know, could innovate messages and delivery systems that over the course of a year might dramatically increase the number of people who visit this site, then become a volunteer or donor at one of the organizations represented by members.

Thanks the goal. We all win with each victory that one of use is able to achieve.

These maps show where they are needed and the blueprints provide a vision that many programs could aspire to. If the program can show on its web site that it is providing the services that are needed each year, then donors and volunteers could look at the type of infrastructure that is needed, and provide the dollars, time or talent to programs in these neighborhoods to help them stay connected to kids and volunteers through all of the years it takes for kids to go from first grade through 12th grade, and even beyond that to when they are looking for jobs and volunteers could be helping open doors.

If the theoretical model is created by a collaboration of programs offering tutoring/mentoring and the people who want such programs to exist and succeed, then donors who believe in the theoretical model should be able to look at a programs web site and decide if they are in an area where the program is needed, doing the type of work that would lead to the outcome they want the program to impact, and then provide the resources needed based on what they have to offer. Visit the Tutor/Mentor Institute for more articles related to this idea.

This chart illustrates the role that intermediaries could take in buiding a theoretical model, or blueprint, that could be a common vision used by those who can help and those who need help. If such a model were created it would relieve all non profits who share the vision with the burden of providing their own theoretical model and would provide a common tool that resource providers and service providers could use to lobby for expanded resources to flow on an on-going and long-term basis.

Does this exist anywhere for the tutor/mentor field?.

These past few weeks of soliciting donations for TM/C's Mapping Solutions event have been an education of sorts. At times, it's seemed that my attempts to spread the word, in person and through mail, add up to nothing more than exercises in preparation for future failures. These weeks have illustrated why perseverance is a necessary trait for anyone who wants to get into the nonprofit business.

But along with perserverance, this experience has also taught me a fundamental lesson about the essence of the conventional nonprofit funding model: it's fundamentally inconsistent. And when funding is inconsistent, so is programming. For this reason, many nonprofit organizations, TM/C among them, are beginning to realize the need for an entirely different model of nonprofit funding. One that not only emphasizes empathy, but equity as well. Such a model would require nonprofits to perceive their potential funders as investors in a cause that translates into dollars and cents. After all, social capital is still capital.

As Tom Raiser, author of ROI for Nonprofits: The New Key to Sustainability, writes, Nonprofits "are very good at filling the need, but are often less adept at: 1) Demonstrating the value of their services [and] 2) Communicating the value in a way that is understood at, fundamental economic level, that makes sense to the private sector. If this demonstration and communication gap can be bridged, the private sector can then be cultivated to become investors in the [nonprofit] that provides something of value to them."

So, in keeping with Raiser's advice, last week I decided to think about my approach to soliciting funds not simply as a volunteer, or 'crusader', but as a salesman or marketing representative selling the service of tutoring and mentoring in a region of metro Chicago that is cripplingly underserved.

Software testing is an investigation of the code and overall product functionalities of the system done to make sure that a high quality of product is developed. There are various approaches to software development of which the most common approach is normal waterfall model or the SDLC approach.

The normal Software SDLC process includes the following process -

1. Requirement Gathering/Planning phase - In this phase the goal and scope of the software is determined. Then as per the goals and aims of the software, requirement is gathered and well documented. It is important that testers are included in this phase itself so that critical points of the application are well understood in the begining itself.
2. Design - In this phase the function specification created in the requirement gathering phase is converted into design of the code
3. Implemetation - In this phase code is written using documents of requirement gathering and design phase
4. Intergration and Testing - Once all the modules of the application are coded, they are integrated and then test is performed on the code to make sure that it is working properly. This is when issues are reported by the testers and regression testing is done.
5. Release - This phase is final release phase of software where the final code is released after testing and debugging.
6. Maintenance - In this phase code maintenance is done depending on enhancements.

Testing is a very critical part of the sofware development. Be it as small project like development of websites or integration of big systems involving complex datastructures and databases, improper testing or no testing can break the product.

Most of us experience use technology on a day to day basis. We experience lack of proper testing when we see bugs in our daily use of technology when we see messages like - "Link not found", "Improper input" etc when we use websites. These are all results of improper code and lack of testing. Whenever a code is developed for a non-commercial purpose it tends to become raw and untested which results in a software failure. A detailed approach and well defined SDLC cycle is very important when developing a product. There are various ways testing can be performed. Testing can be manual as well as automated.

Although crucial to software quality and widely deployed by programmers and testers, software testing still remains an art, and due to limited understanding of the principles of software. The difficulty in software testing comes from the complexity of software: we can not completely test a program with moderate complexity. Testing is more than debugging a code. The purpose of testing can be quality assurance, verification and validation, or reliability estimation or just a user perspective of usage. Be whatever the purpose of testing is, it should be taken into consideration very seriously.

“There must always be room for judgment, but judgment aided—and even enhanced—by procedure.” Dr. Atul Gawande, The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right

Any individual or organization planning a mentoring program should first read the report commissioned by The Mentoring Center in 2000, which found “two distinct areas of challenge within the general field of mentoring and the mentoring agencies that make up the field.” The first, which essentially leads into the latter and is the most striking, was the need for a general acknowledgment, among people within the mentoring community and outside of it, of the practice of mentoring as an “emerging discipline,” one with a codified body of procedures of a kind typical to any profession. The second area of challenge was the “current condition, pressures and capacities of the mentoring agencies” in the field.

The report calls for both volunteers and professionals involved in mentoring to take a critical, managerial look at mentoring as more than a hobby or a “good cause.” “Our research has revealed that the field of mentoring is generally lacking [a] systematic approach, a ‘science’ if you will…”

It would be a mistake to think that because mentoring starts with one human being positively intervening in the life of another that is where it ends. Individual judgment is only the start. What must accompany any attempt to organize a mentoring organization or group or one-on-one relationship is a disciplined, critical approach toward establishing effective procedure. The “how” is just as important as the “why”—purpose shouldn't submerge method; it should burnish it.

This means focusing on the same concepts that businesses focus on during the planning process—delivery systems, supply chains, infomatics, efficiency. One of the few differences is that a mentor’s “bottom line” isn’t monetary profit. It’s the common good. During the next several weeks, I’ll evaluate several important aspects of effective programming—with much of my research culled from Tutor/Mentor’s virtual library.

His 1965 study on black poverty prepared for the Johnson administration, in which he attributed the disintegration of the black family as a primary factor in black social misery—“The breakdown of the Negro family is the principal cause of all the problems of delinquency, crime, school dropouts, unemployment and poverty which are bankrupting our cities”—opened him up to public castigation, particularly from the left. In a recent New York Times review of a book of letters by the Senator—Daniel Patrick Moynihan: A Portrait in Letters of an American Visionary, edited by Steven R. Weisman—David Brooks writes that the report “unleashed a wave of fury” and accusations that Moynihan was a racist.

Moynihan’s notion that a culture of poverty might be to blame for black failure isn’t new. Other thinkers before him, most notably Gunnar Myrdal in his 1944 An American Dilemma, acknowledged the same thing. True, Myrdal’s argument was perhaps a bit more carefully qualified and less reliant on cultural causation than Moynihan’s, with the former taking pains to assert that such a culture of poverty was itself the result of a self-fulfilling prophecy put in motion by the “false definition,” framed by white prejudice, of blacks as inferior: “White prejudice and discrimination keep the Negro low in standards of living, health, education, manners and morals. This, in turn, gives support to white prejudice. White prejudice and Negro standards thus mutually ‘cause’ each other.” Nonetheless, the cultural factor of black poverty is still hugely important in Myrdal’s thesis, if not quite to the extent that it is in Moynihan’s.

The biggest problem that most critics saw in such reports emphasizing poverty as a cultural occurrence is that, by focusing on “morals” and “manners,” they seemed to be “blaming the victim” for his condition. But this critique itself has proven to be rather short-sighted. Ralph Ellison presciently diagnosed the misguided fury of Moynihan’s critics in his review of An American Dilemma. “Indeed, the main virtue of An American Dilemma lies in its demonstration of how the mechanism of prejudice operates to disguise the moral conflict in the minds of whites produced by the clash on the social level between the American Creed and the anti-Negro practices. There is, however, a danger in this very virtue.”

The danger was not necessarily inherent in Myrdal’s tome, or even in Moynihan’s report. The danger lay in the American public’s overreliance on abstract explanations of sociological phenomena, which might lead it to take the bleak realities presented in Myrdal’s and Moynihan’s studies as proof that blacks actually were inferior and, because of this, their fate sealed from birth. The reports, while ostensibly conducted in order to mitigate black poverty, would in reality work to perpetuate the self-fulfilling prophecy

“Since its inception,” Ellison wrote, “American social science has been closely bound with American Negro destiny.” The late nineteenth century popularity of Social Darwinism; the controversy surrounding Richard Herrnstein’s and Charles Murray’s 1994 book The Bell Curve, which posits innate cognitive ability, as opposed to culture, as the determining factor in black poverty; and the 1996 welfare reform battle all bear this out. For most of American history, the national perception of poor blacks, and the prevailing reasons for their poverty, has often been aligned with whatever sociological or economic theories are most popular at the time, with the result that poor blacks are rarely perceived by the wider society as being more than an assemblage of pathologies—victims, criminals, miscreants, “welfare queens,” etc.

But whether a liberal castigation of culture as “blaming the victim” or a conservative focus on a “culture of poverty” that seeks to transfer the responsibility for being poor from the markets to the man—both views miss the mark. And the present resurgence of the view for which Moynihan was ostracized in 1965 illustrates precisely how.

A New York Times article this week notes that Moynihan’s thesis is gaining traction again among academic circles. This is in light of recent news that the poverty rate of Americans has risen to its highest level in 15 years; a “collection of papers on unmarried parents, a subject, it noted, that became off-limits after the Moynihan report,” released by Princeton and the Brookings Institution; as well as, I suspect (though this isn’t mentioned in the article), a Brookings report on the rise in the rates of suburban poverty (in which black and brown suburbs predominate).

“With these studies come many new and varied definitions of culture, but they all differ from the ‘60s-era model in these crucial respects: Today, social scientists are rejecting the notion of a monolithic and unchanging culture of poverty. And they attribute destructive attitudes and behavior not to inherent moral character but to sustained racism and isolation.” As I mentioned, this neo-Moynihan thinking is not all that “neo” at all. Moynihan himself, like Myrdal, was quite aware of the pernicious effects of racism and wasn’t necessarily laying blame in the laps of poor blacks. What is new, however, is the way more people are beginning to define culture—not as something exclusive to a set of manners or morals or mores, but as something that encompasses all parts of a society. As William Julius Wilson notes, “I realized we needed a comprehensive measure of the environment, that we must consider structural and cultural force.”

Furthermore, while it seems pretty straightforward, the academy is finally beginning to realize what "lesser lights" have known all along—urban poverty is the result of the Goliath of symmetrical disadvantage working against the David of asymmetrical advantage. For every child born into urban poverty, the stars are symmetrically aligned for him to fail and asymmetrically aligned (i.e. not aligned at all) for him to succeed—his family unit is broken from the beginning, his mother is often out of the home working, he is practically raised by his peers, he goes to school hungry, he notices that he has more of an incentive to sell drugs in order to make quick money to eat or buy clothes than he does to concentrate in school, he begins to sell drugs—right at this moment, the cultural and the systemic meet in perfect synchrony—he gets arrested, meets an overzealous prosecutor doing the dirty work of a politician eager to show that he’s tough on crime, runs into an overzealous code of drug laws, goes to prison, and if he has a child, he leaves behind a cycle that will begin anew…

"Lesser lights"—nonprofits, activists, teachers, mentors, tutors, volunteers—have understood for a long time now that the best real world response to symmetrical disadvantage is not symmetrical reform, that’s not possible in the short- or even intermediate term; but rather, asymmetrical reform. This means that while so-called cultural factors such as attitudes, values, and behaviors might not be sufficient explanations for an all-encompassing theory of urban poverty, the best and sometimes only means of reform for teachers and administrators at the KIPP Academy in the Bronx, for instance, is to emphasize these cultural factors as if they’re all that matters. It means counteracting an attitude of academic indifference and incuriosity by overemphasizing the importance of learning, or mitigating the influence of gangs in the lives of children by providing a surfeit of after-school and out-of-school activities and programs. For reformers whose laboratories are in the streets and not in the ivy towers, often times culture is the only determining factor, because it’s the only factor they can directly control.

Perhaps by de-stigmatizing the cultural explanation, legislators and policymakers will finally come around to realizing how critical asymmetrical organizations such as mentoring and tutoring groups are in the fight against urban poverty and start funding them accordingly. That’s an essential first step toward turning symmetrical disadvantage into symmetrical advantage, which would include measures such as incorporating mentoring and tutoring into the educational curriculum in school districts of need.

Every day, youth in mentoring and tutoring program are setting goals and trying to reach them. Whether it’s earning an A in Biology, making the marching band, applying to colleges, or learning how to cook something other than grilled cheese, talking about goals is an important part of any mentoring relationship. Research from around the world has shown that youth with strong goals and strong goal-directed behaviors have the most positive development and the least negative outcomes. However, there are not many research-based tools out there to help mentors build these critical life skills in young people.

Over the past year, a team of researchers at Tufts University in Massachusetts has worked to fill that gap. Dr. Ed Bowers and his team designed a set of tools that make talking about and eventually achieving goals through a mentoring relationship easier, more fun, and more effective in promoting youth’s positive development. We call this system Project GPS, and we’ve based it on the most cutting-edge research on youth development as well as feedback from youth-serving professionals from around the country.

Project GPS includes a comprehensive series of quick and easy measurement tools, known as rubrics. There are also nearly thirty fun activities, several inspirational videos of young people talking about how they achieved their goals, and much more.

Right now, Dr. Bowers and his team need mentoring programs to participate in an upcoming evaluation of Project GPS, which will provide each participating program with free access to the entire suite of tools, as well as valuable data regarding the goal-directed behaviors and positive development of the youth in your care. Project GPS can be adapted to work with the particular structures and objectives of different programs.

To find out more about Project GPS and how you can promote goal management skills in the youth in your program, email Mimi Arbeit at tuftsgps@gmail.com to set up an informational phone call.

Project GPS is a project of the Institute for Applied Research on Youth Development, directed by

Dr. Richard Lerner.

In the suburbs, where I live, there is an entire shadow population of impoverished citizens that is rarely mentioned in studies on poverty—an issue that most people seem to associate with the inner-city. But poverty is no respecter of jurisdiction. Dan’s recent blog post alerted me to a new Brookings study that fleshes this reality out; noting that, while poverty in suburban areas grew over the past several years, there was little institutional support to mitigate its effects. “Suburbs were home to a large and fast-growing poor population in the 2000s, yet many don’t have an adequate social services infrastructure in place to address the challenge.” An important reason for this neglect is the tremendous difficulty of, coupled with the lack of critical attention given to, implementing effective social networks in places where the poor aren’t nearly as concentrated as they are in the city. The logistics become that much more complicated. This is all the more reason why TM/C's maps are so essential in the fight against poverty.

The issue of education reform has gained considerable traction in the media, thanks in no small part to the documentary that Dan mentioned about a week ago called “Waiting for Superman”. I haven’t seen it yet, but apparently the scene on which the film’s raw emotional power hinges takes place in a school auditorium where, as New York Times columnist Gail Collins writes, “parents and kids sit nervously…holding their lottery numbers while somebody pulls out balls and announces the lucky winners of seats in next fall’s charter school class. The lucky families jump up and down and scream with joy while the losing parents and kids cry. In some of the lotteries, there are 20 heartbroken children for every happy one.”

This is one of the scenes that were previewed on an episode of Oprah last week. I saw it. And Collins’s description doesn’t quite do what I saw justice. There was every bit of nervousness; of exultation; of disappointment; of despair, sure. But what Collins’s description lacks are the more nuanced emotions of apathy I saw on many faces, before the lottery and after; of confusion over why a lottery was being conducted in the first place; of quiet resolve contoured with contentment—all feelings nurtured in an atmosphere that is only suitable for escaping.

I’ve heard lots of talk about the schools—their lack of funding or excessive funding, their short years and short hours, how their manacled by the teacher’s unions, their lack of innovation in the classroom—but little talk about the reason parents are compelled to resort to putting their children’s names in a lottery in the first place. People didn’t go to that auditorium because the public schools were failing their children, per se. People went to that auditorium because the streets were all too successful. And yet, as Dan rightly mentioned, this point seems to have been entirely overlooked in the national discussion that “Waiting for Superman” has provoked.

Mediocre schools just aren’t very powerful incubators in neighborhoods where poverty rates hover over sixty percent. The winning question, in turn, should be how can schools in low-income neighborhoods, where most “dropout factories” and many poorly performing schools are clustered, make their students as street-repellant as possible? The answer won’t just come out of thin air. And you’re just as unlikely to get it from the people running things, as Geoffrey Canada discusses in this enlightened clip. Reform, if it’s to work, will require a community approach; an all hands on deck effort from citizens and nonprofit organizations and community development corporations and business people…In other words, Superman isn’t coming—change is up to you.

Consistent with TM/C's emphasis on social networking, I created my own network of affiliations using CMAP. This is rough in comparison with others who've posted theirs, but it's a start. From here, I'll start making connections among the various affiliations, digging even deeper into the ways in which they relate and exposing even more nodes of interconnection.

In his September 8 blog post , Dan put Mayor Daley's historic decision not to run for reelection in the context of tutor/mentor interests throughout the city. During his over 20-year tenure, Daley enacted educational reforms such as the adopt-a-school initiative that, while laudable, weren't far-sighted enough. Daley's myopic focus on school performance worked to the detriment of a more holistic, community focus. But Daley isn't alone in his short-sightedness. According to PolicyLink, the Senate voted to fund President Obama's comprehensive, cutting-edge Promise Neighborhoods initiative--a policy that seeks to address the issue of educational reform by involving both in-school and out-of-school resources--for only $20 million next year, a full $190 million short of the President's request.

Compare the stutter-step pace of the Senate and the Daley administration to companies such as IBM and Google. While Congressmen offer harangues and diatribes about failing schools on C-Span, private companies are stepping into the state's funding chasm, bypassing the red-taped committee meetings, and providing money to community organizations whose operating procedures comform to what is swiftly becoming the new paradigm in educational reform--but what is really something that Dan Bassill, along with a few other change agents across the country, began thinking about decades ago. For instance, IBM's Smarter Cities website promotes ideas such as an "educational continuum" to move children from grade school into careers, a concept that isn't much different from the Harlem Children Zone's "pipeline" concept or Tutor/Mentor Connection's "7 Success Steps", shown here:

But private funding on the level that must be maintained in order to perpetuate programs such as Tutor/Mentor Connection in Chicago, Harlem Children's Zone in Harlem, and KIPP Academy in the South Bronx--all programs that emphasize cultural and environmental factors as primary determinants of academic success, not just teacher performance or per-pupil funding or classroom size--into the long-term future, is still at the level of germination.

While commumity organizations must do their parts to seize the moment at a time when private companies are starting to warm to the causes of social responsibility and public-private partnership, it will be up to us as citizens to bring the government up to speed with the paradigm shift that's occuring on the ground. Call your your local Congressmen and -women and tell them that by cutting funds for Promise Neighborhoods and forward-thinking legislation like it, they're not just cutting the budget. For millions of children across the country, they're cutting hope.

I've led Cabrini Connections, Tutor/Mentor Connection since 1993. That was well before the internet became such an important tool. I've used computers to organize and communicate my ideas since around 1980. Thus, much of what I've created in the past is stored on floppy disks that may never be opened again.

Most of our ideas show the role of an intermediary, or third-party leader, who brings together people and ideas in places that connect directly with youth living in high poverty, who would not have this help if someone did not make it a life-long priority to take on this T/MC type role.

In the past couple of weeks I've browsed back through some of my old files, just to remind myself of ideas that I had put on paper, letters I had written, and people I had tried to connect with. Some of these ideas had almost been forgotten as new ideas replaced them. Some were still relevant, and might become realities today if given some new attention.

Many of these focus on engaging the time, talent, and resources of universities, and their alumni.

In the Groups section on this forum we have many sub groups. One is a Northwestern University group. Another is a University of Michigan group. Another is an Acacia Fraternity group, which has chapters on more than 20 university campuses. All have the same goals of engaging people who have something in common, in team-based efforts that help us help inner city kids to careers.

In the Northwestern group I've posted an update showing how we have many alumni on our staff, who are writing blogs showing what they do, and how others are involved. I also added links to three documents that I had created almost 10 years ago, showing steps that might lead to university engagement.

We'd like to see groups from every university forming and using these ideas. We'd like to see more people from NU, Michigan and Acacia in the groups we have now, trying to make the ideas a reality, taking ownership of the T/MC vision so it's not depending on just myself, or a few other people.

You don't need to host your group on our Ning site. Deanna Wilkerson of Ohio State University has set up a group on this site.

What we do want to do is make sure there are connections between these groups, so people and ideas can be shared from place to place, enabling us all to constantly innovate new and better ways to use our assets and resources to make a positive difference in the world.

You can find more ideas to support university involvement in these links

* business school connection

* service learning ideas

* Tutor/Mentor Connection ideas/pdfs

Please join us, or share your own link. We can do more by working with each other than by working in silos, or even, against each other.

In Harvard Business Review’s September issue, there’s an article—“A New Alliance for Global Change”—that predicts nothing short of a paradigm shift toward a new business-nonprofit partnership: “Collaboration between corporations and CSOs [citizen sector organizations] has reached a tipping point: It is becoming standard operating procedure.”

After stumbling into the New York Times’ Economix Blog today, I saw this graph under the headline “Corporate Profits Near Pre-Recession Peak”

As you can see, second quarter earnings for 2010 are hovering around the third quarter 2006 level, despite the Labor Department’s disappointing announcement that the jobless rate rose to 9.6% this month. If Harvard Business Review is correct in its assessment of the nascent partnership of corporations and CSOs, then this seemingly paradoxical news shouldn’t make me wince that much. It would suggest that the current quarterly success of corporations reflects, if only in small measure, the concurrent success of organizations such as Cabrini Connections and TM/C. But is this the case, yet?

I attempted an answer in the attachment: The Future of Wealth.pdf

Tutor/Mentor Connection

Brainstorming and Collaboration Meeting

August 30, 2010

• Introductions
• • Organizations present:

Becoming We The People

Cabrini Connections, Tutor/Mentor Connection

Camp of Dreams

Chicago Lights Tutoring and Summer Day

Howard Area Community Center—Youth Division Programs

Lake County Regional Office of Education

Life Directions—Chicago

New Horizons Mentoring Program at Gads Hill Center

Wicker Park Learning Center

• Priorities/Feedback Forum
• • Reviewed results from 2009 survey of program needs and how the current challenges
    of programs might be similar/differ
  • • Fundraising
    • • Programs that have depended on federal dollars now leaning more on private
        donations
      • Given the economy, grants and money from foundations even more
        competitive—programs finding innovative ways to evaluate programs and
        show results-oriented data for grants
      • Smaller fundraiser events—board members leading small-scale fundraisers
      • Tough to quantify mentoring side of relationships which is more anecdotal
    • Volunteer recruitment
    • • Need volunteers willing to commit for a longer time period; programs not
        taking “just anyone” so can be hard to find the right people
      • Some of the best recruitment comes from word of mouth; focus on keeping
        current mentors/volunteer happy and helping them have the best
        experience so they will refer friends (support/check in meetings,
        monthly social events, “open door” policy)
      • Pair with civic organizations that do volunteering as a group
    • Engaging university students and interns as volunteers
    • • DePaul University Steans Center for
        Service Learning
      • Partnerships with Chicago School of Professional Psychology (Job Fair this
        Wednesday—check their website for details)
      • Loyola—upcoming internship fair
      • Recruiting quality interns—best luck when post a job description and then
        interview the candidates
    • Social Networking
    • • Facebook vs. Twitter: Twitter can reach a more general network of people with
        more content specific information (ie: “Read this article and pass it
        along” or “Attend this meeting today!”)
      • Important to have a presence within all social networking platforms (Facebook, Linked-in,
        Twitter, etc.) in order to connect with those who use each account
      • Facebook groups: can be helpful to have separate groups designated for mentors,
        parents, and students
      • Get creative. Camp of Dreams posts inspirational quotes to Twitter and
        ‘words of the day’ to Facebook and kids get rewarded for using that
        word in their statuses
    • Program policies
    • • Questions regarding how different programs handle legal/logistical policy issues
        (ex: Can students attend sporting events where there is alcohol served?
        Are permission slips needed for every type of event?)
      • Can be best to have generalized policies (re: Mentors must not drink in the
        presence of a student and may not take students to a venue where
        consumption of alcohol is the primary activity)
      • What are the Illinois
        laws for youth programs? Do you have an attorney who can advise you on
        these matters?
      • Best practices in this area—potential workshop topic!
    • Background Checks
    • • State of Oregon
        provides free background checks to mentors—could something like this be
        duplicated in IL?
      • Potentially valuable to form a consortium of programs to do background checks
        together and bring down the costs
      • Adam Walsh Act—background check that Cabrini Connections uses
      • Having mentors pay or partially pay for the background checks as an upfront”
        buy-in” to the program

• Ideas for T/MC to Best Serve Program Needs
• • Hold meetings throughout the year based around specific topics (ex: marketing,
    program evaluation, fundraising) so programs with particular interests
    can share best practices and collaborate

• November 2010 Tutor/Mentor Leadership and Networking Conference
• • Tentative dates: November 11^th-12^th OR November 18^th-19^th
    
  • Location: Tentatively DePaul University, Lincoln Park
    Campus (Nov 11/12)—will be spread amongst several buildings, so if we
    find a more convenient location in the next few weeks, we are open to
    suggestions!!

• Conference Brainstorm
• • Workshops ideas
  • • Social Networking
    • Program Policies
    • Background checks
    • How mentor programs decrease drop-out rates (overview of statistics and data)
    • Coalition Building around issues such as substance abuse prevention

• Wrap-up and Upcoming Events
• • Life Directions: Parties for Peacemakers Retreat—contact Van Bensett
  • Becoming We the People: September 11^th Scavenger hunt and community
    building event—contact Jordan Hestermann
  • New Horizons Mentoring Program at Gad’s Hill: in process of hiring ten full-time
    mentors as part of Culture of Calm Initiative; looking for good
    candidates—contact Katie Cusack or Sandy Reyes
  • Camp of Dreams: Community Days open house on September 25th, need volunteers to teach
    high school seminars on leadership and community service—contact Jacquita Smith or Michaela Pease

** Conference Planning Meeting: Tuesday, September 21^st at 12:00pm**