Wednesday, July 01, 2009

Tutor/Mentor Leadership & Networking Conference on May 28&29th

I was honored to be invited to the leadership conference organized by Cabrini Connections on the first working day.

I with another two interns KG & Karse from South Korea was helping the staff collecting some conference files before Thursday. Dan was showing me related links with introduction of this conference. I already knew what was going on between Thursday and Friday.

We had to arrive in the conference earlier than working days around 8:30am. The conference was located the downtown Northwestern University Law School, which I dreamed of studying there one day. The place was such wonderful as hold the conference. You could see the beautiful Lake Michigan from the windows. The weather was so nice during two days.

When I was arrived there, I already saw some staffs were busy with some preparations before guests came in. I was told to be a photographer during the conference, and upload the photos to our website.

The conference schedule was very informative, which was a good way to know the tutor/mentor program in America. When I talked to the people who took part in the conference, they were not only from Chicago, but also from other states in America. The reason was why they came to the conference, because they wanted to know more about updating information of program and took advantage of meeting new people who did the same thing in America. I was surprised to see a lot of people enrich the tutor/mentor program in America. In my home country-China, we called Hope Program.

As the organizer of this conference, Cabrini Connections took a lot of efforts. They arranged varieties of workshops for different participants demands. And also they invited good speakers to share their experiences during the opening and lunch time. I thought it was very valuable and worth going there.

Some speakers impressed me that was Jeffrey Fields and Thomas M. Donnelly. And I learned a lot from the workshops.
Like I know the Lawyers Lend-A-Hand to Youth's (LAH) can encourage one-on-one, long term tutor/mentor relationships and to support the work of tutor/mentor programs by awarding grants, recruiting volunteers, and promoting best practices. Since January 2008, LAH has awarded $200,000 annually to exemplary tutor/mentor programs. With this recent increase in the excess of $800,000 to programs serving disadvantaged youth, more details you want to know LAH, please visit their website www.lawyerslendhand.org

Liz Livingston Howard, who was the professor of Kellogg School Center for Nonprofit Management in the Northwestern University, was introducing the current Nonprofit Environment, and shared her management experience on nonprofit how to improve the donor/member/customer.

Eric Davis, who was the founder of the Global Citizen Experience, told us to build community engagement: A global model with local foundations. His workshop looked like a panel discussion and leaded us to figure out what your nonprofit organization goal is.

I was very tired to acquire a lot of knowledge from two-days, but I felt very excited to take part in this leadership and networking conference. Cabrini Connections was doing a great job for the conference and gave me a chance to participate in it.

Now I have to start thinking about what will I do and how can I enrich my internship……

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