Introduction to Tutor/Mentor Exchange Web Site and Strategy

During her Jan-Feb 2015 internship with Tutor/Mentor Institute, LLC, Wona Chang created two visualizations using Prezi. In one she showed a "learning path" that guides visitors through the different strategies and resources offered by the T/MI and Tutor/Mentor Connection. In the second, she showed different sections of the T/MI web site.

Below is the "learning path" video:



Below is the introduction to the Tutor/Mentor Institute, LLC web site at http://www.tutormentorexchange.net

Hopefully these will be used by thousands of people who are looking for ways to help high quality, constantly-improving tutor/mentor programs grow in big cities like Chicago.

I wrote this article focused on deeper learning in 2012. It emphasizes the many hours of reading and reflection needed to understand issues before being able to lead and innovate solutions. The work Wona and other interns have done illustrates a learning strategy that could be duplicated in many places. Spend time browsing information related to an issue that is important to you, then create your own visualization to guide others through the same information.

If more people do this for many years we can change the way we solve problems in the world.  As I've said in the past, I think youth in high schools, college and other non-school tutor/mentor programs could be doing the same type of work as Wona and past interns have done, helping others in their community find and use ideas that help great programs grow in ALL of the places where kids need extra help.

If you're doing this work, or want to do it with the Tutor/Mentor Institute, LLC please introduce yourself.

Follow this Learning Path to Understand Tutor/Mentor Connection strategies

For the past 9 years interns from South Korea, China, India and US universities have spent time with Tutor/Mentor Connection (T/MC) in Chicago working on projects that help communicate the ideas and strategies T/MC has developed over the past 40 years. The January 2015 intern is Wona Chang,from South Korea. Below is a presentation she created over the past two weeks, to provide a different guide to this concept map.


In this page you can see other projects which were also done using Prezi. However, Wona is the first intern to figure out how to create a sound track, where she guides visitors through the presentation. She also put in web links pointing to some of the same sites the original concept map points to.

In addition to creating an English language version, Wona created a Korean language version (2016 note: these are no longer available on Prezi). Since every major city in the world has areas of concentrated poverty where people live more isolated from the rest of the community and its resources, the T/MC strategy could be duplicated in many countries. Thus, finding ways to creating versions of the blog articles and web presentations in different languages will help leaders in other countries find and adopt these ideas.

Wona and I share ideas in this on-line forum. If you'd like to work on one of the T/MC visualizations, join in.

New Intern helps launch 2015

Since 2006 interns from various universities have spent time helping communicate ideas and strategies of Tutor/Mentor Connection and Tutor/Mentor Institute.

Each intern starts with an introduction. You can see many from past interns on this page.

Our newest intern is Wona Chang, from South Korea. She created this Prezi presentation to introduce herself. She said "It was the first time that I work on prezi, so what I first did was learn how to use it. I had a lot of fun learning new skills."

Thanks one goal of this internship. Students should learn new skills and have fun doing it. While Wona works with me in Chicago, others are invited to join our Tutor/Mentor Group and do similar projects from where ever you are.

Simplifying Complex Ideas - Role of Interns

This is a graphic introduced a few months ago on the Tutor/Mentor Institute, LLC blog via this article. Most people looking at this will be overwhelmed and won't dig deeper to understand how it relates to their own involvement with helping youth through school and into jobs.

Since 2005 interns from Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT), Hong Kong Baptist, Northwestern, Loyola and many other universities have been spending time reading articles like this, then creating their own interpretations, in an effort to help more people view, understand, then apply the ideas.

The video below was launched today. It was created by SUNJOONG YOO, who is one of two students from South Korea working with the Tutor/Mentor Institute, LLC since Jan 20.

Once you've looked at the video do you understand it's message better than before? If so, please share it with leaders in business, colleges, politics, etc. so others will understand and apply the ideas. Youth from many schools, youth organizations and cities could be creating visualizations like this as part of a citywide effort to transform the way youth are supported. If you'd like to help make this happen we'd like to hear from you.

Interns make a difference!

I've introduced Byungkwan Jang (left in picture) and Sunjoong Yoo in previous posts. They are interns from Illinois Institute of Technology and universities in South Korea who have been with me for the past four weeks.

This week Byungkwan Jang completed a revision of the banks section of the Tutor/Mentor Program Locator's Asset Maps. This is work that has been needed since 2009, but I've not had money to hire anyone to do it, nor have I found a volunteer with the skill and experience to do it. Thus, I'm thrilled that Byungkwan volunteered to take on this role.

Visit this page to see his report on updating the asset maps. Read more about this on the Mapping for Justice Blog and the Tutor/Mentor Institute blogs.

The Power of Small Change

This video was created over the past two weeks by SunjoongYoo, who is a winter 2014 intern of Tutor/Mentor Institute, LLC in Chicago.



This is one of many visualizations created by interns since 2005. It's also an example of the type of project students from many place could be doing in an on-going effort to create more and better non-school learning, mentoring and job training opportunities for youth living in high poverty neighborhoods.

New Interns at Tutor/Mentor Institute, LLC

Two new interns from South Korea, via a partnership with Illinois Institute of Technology, started working with me last week.

This is part of a program that has been on-going since 2005. Interns spend from a week to a year with me. During their time they read articles posted on the Tutor/Mentor Blog, Scribd.com, Pinterest, and the Tutor/Mentor Institute, LLC home page. Then they create new visualizations to provide their own interpretation of those ideas.

The network map helps them identify people in their own family, work, college and/or military network who may be interested in these ideas and who may pass them on to others.

The graphic above is a network map created by Sunjoong Yoo This link points to an self-introduction he created on Prezi.

Shining Spotlight on Interns from Past

This is the final day of the May-July 2013 internship with Tutor/Mentor Institute, LLC for Byeonghui Kim and Kyungryul Kim, students from South Korea and IIT in Chicago.

When they arrived I introduce a "web quest" idea, using an animated video that you can see here.

During their internship they each created two new presentations showing strategies that can be applied by leaders in Chicago, South Korea or any other place to mobilize resources and support the growth and distribution of mentor-rich youth organizations in places where they are most needed. This past week Byeonghui Kim published this visualization, using Prezi.

At the same time Kyungryul Kim developed a video, posted on YouTube, introducing the same interns, but using a different form of communications.

Since 2005 several dozen interns from colleges in the US, South Korea and China have spent time creating new interpretations of the strategies I've been creating for over 40 years. Hopefully some of these interns will continue to work with these strategies in future years, or some of the people looking at them will adopt them in their own efforts.

I support this work in a sub group at http://tutormentorconnection.ning.com and I invite students from junior high, high school and colleges around the world to join the group and create your own interpretations of this information.

I've posted work done by interns and fellow in these following locations:

Strategy presentation pages on Tutor/Mentor Institute, LLC site. Be sure to view all three pages.

Videos by interns posted on Tutor/Mentor Conference site. 2005-2012. 2013 projects done by Byeonghui Kim and Kyungryul Kim.

Graphics by past interns, on Pinterest.

Introduction of interns, on Tutor/Mentor Institute, LLC site The projects from past years need to be updated where links are broken. They also need to be re-circulated so more people view these ideas. There is work for many. Please get involved.

New Video Shows Planning Strategy Needed in War on Poverty

Kyungryul Kim, an intern from South Korea, has created a new video to communicate the ideas in this PDF essay, which shows strategies needed to build and sustain a wide range of youth serving organizations reaching k-12 kids in high poverty areas of Chicago and other cities.


This are a few of many presentations created by interns since 2005. View more in this blog and on this page.

How YOU can make a difference! New Video by Intern

This is a new video for Tutor/Mentor Connection (T/MC), created by Kyungryul Kim from South Korea. He is in an internship with T/MC in Chicago. Kyngryul looked at a past presentation about Tutor/Mentor connection, and made this video to communicate the ideas in a new way.



As you browse through articles posted on this blog for the past several years you can see work done by many other interns. Or goal is that hundreds, or even thousands, of young people in cities across the world become involved in this project, using their own talents to share ideas and mobilize volunteers and donors to support youth-serving programs in places where they are most needed.

If you want to get involved subscribe to the Tutor/Mentor Connection forum and join this group.

New Interns - Introductions

Two new students from IIT and Korean Universities started six-week internships with Tutor/Mentor Connection, Tutor/Mentor Institute, LLC last week. Below are their introductions:

Kyungryul Kim



ByeongHui Kim



Over the next six weeks Kyngryul and ByeongHui will use their communications talent to showcase the ideas that others in Chicago, Korea and around the world can use to build systems that make mentor-rich tutoring programs available to youth in more high poverty neighborhoods. Visit this group to follow their progress and to join in if you'd like to do similar work.

Interns Map Growth of Network

During the May-June 2012 internship Mina Song and Chul Wan Park have been doing some very important work for the Tutor/Mentor Institute, LLC.

Chul spent his six weeks learning to use Gephi.com Social Network Analysis (SNA) tools and create a set of maps showing how the network at http://tutormentorconnection.ning.com has grown from three people in 2007 when it was created by Daniel F. Bassill, D.H.L., founder of the Tutor/Mentor Connection and the Tutor/Mentor Institute, LLC, until May 31, 2012. The map below is one of many that you can see in Chul's report.

This map shows the 209 people who joined the Ning site by the end of 2009 and shows how some have begun to build networks of "friends". 

While Chul was learning to use Gephi and pulling data from the membership files on the Ning site, Mina Song was reading articles from the various Tutor/Mentor Institute, LLC blogs and web sites. She used these to create five new presentations introducing the Tutor/Mentor Connection and describing the four-part problem solving strategy. Then during the past week she created a final project describing the importance of expanding social networks for inner-city kids and demonstrating how the social network analysis maps created by Chul could be used to show the growth of networks to potential donors and partners.

Mina posted links to each of the presentations she did. Click here.

Chul and Mina are college students from Korea who have spent six months studying at Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago. Tutor/Mentor Connection has had a partnership with IIT for several years in which interns join us each winter and spring and work on projects like the ones Mina and Chul have worked on.

Our goal is that students from high schools and colleges all over the world will join in this project. You don't need to be in Chicago to look at the ideas we share and develop your own presentations to show how these ideas might apply in your own community.

What the Social Network Analysis project shows is the power of network-building. If just one person in a community has an idea for solving a problem, that person can share that idea and invite others to join in. If the person is persistent, creative and able to acquire needed technology and financial support, the network of people working to solve that problem should grow.

Using maps and network analysis tools can provide transparency to the process and can be tools for bringing people together who share the same geography and/or are affected by the same problem.

We're really grateful for the work Mina and Chul have done this past six weeks and for the partnership with IIT that has connected us with these talented students.

If you'd like to get involved just join the http://tutormentorconnection.ning.com group or introduce yourself on Twitter or Facebook.

Sense-Making. Role of Interns

This is a project created by Mina Song, IIT intern, to show the knowledge management strategies of the Tutor/Mentor Connection. Mina had to read through many pages of information to build her own understanding before she could create this presentation. Mina is part of an internship program sponsored by Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) which has been working with Tutor/Mentor Connection for several years.

This is the second project Mina did, which shows the efforts T/MC makes to increase the number of people who look at the information we collect and share.

If you browse through articles posted on this blog since 2006 you can see the work of many interns and volunteers. This collective effort is intended to increase the number of people who are strategically involved in helping youth in high poverty areas of Chicago and other cities have access to non-school adult support systems that help them move from first grade to a job and adult responsibilities over a 10 to 20 year period of continuous support.

As one volunteer wrote in 2010 in an article titled Thinking like Google, "It occurred to me that this forum is essentially modeled on a similar format as Google's. Tutormentorconnection.ning.com a) looks for information, or content, and people relevant to the cause of tutoring and mentoring; b) organizes, analyzes, and archives that information for future reference; and c) utilizes those references for targeted advertising campaigns, social networking, grant-writing, and the like. Even more to the point, this forum is a way of attempting to grow the idea of tutoring and mentoring to scale, or to a point where it "tips".

The "In-Forming" Process works something like this:

1. Uninformed people interact with information and become informed.

2. Informed people interact with uninformed people, producing more informed people.

3. Informed people interact with each other.

4. To the point where new information is being passed along to all parties involved, starting the process over again."

With the help of students from hundreds of colleges and universities we can dramatically increase the number of people who are becoming informed, and then interacting with others, so they also become informed, and then more strategically involved in helping a city-wide network of youth supports grow and be sustained for many years.

Meet Spring 2012 Interns

On Wednesday, May 16 two new students from Korea, via Illinois Institute of Technology, joined the Tutor/Mentor Institute, LLC for a six week internship. See introductions of Mina and Chul. Mina posted this introduction in her blog space on the Tutor/Mentor Connection forum and said "I used prezi.com for creating my introduction." She later told me this was her first experience using Prezi.com This illustrates one of the benefits to students who participate in this project. It challenges them to learn new ways to build understanding and share complex ideas. These are skills the students can take with them into the rest of their lives.

Mentoring offers Hope and Opportunity

This graphic is from an animation, which was created by Song Mi Lee during the six week internship she just completed with the Tutor/Mentor Institute, LLC.  View it on this Ning.com page.  Read article by Song Me Lee - click here

Our interns are part of a partnership with Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) in Chicago. Students come from Korea and China for a semester and spend the last six weeks in an internship with a local business or non profit. The video below is another project that Song Mi completed on her final day with us.



Another heart shape project is shown here. This was animated, and you can find it in this video.

 The work space for these projects is in the Tutor/Mentor Connection forum. Visit and you can see work for the past few years.

This wiki page describes our goal of recruiting students from many high schools and colleges to do this work. This page shows how students doing this work can be acting as the research team for universities trying to build a better understanding of the Tutor/Mentor Connection and Tutor/Mentor Institute, LLC.

Thank you to Song Mi and Sung Hee for their work this winter. If you'd like to become involved just join the Tutor/Mentor Connection forum and introduce yourself.

Introduction to Tutor/Mentor Connection

This video was created by Song Hee Jung and Song Mi Lee, interns from IIT and Korea who have just completed a six week internship with the Tutor/Mentor Connection and Tutor/Mentor Institute, LLC.



Follow the intern project on the Tutor/Mentor Connection forum.

Interns for Jan-Feb - Assignments

This pdf is the introduction created by Song Mi Lee, our second Jan/Feb 2012 intern. Visit the Tutor/Mentor Connection forum to see how I coach interns and the projects they develop.

For the past couple of years the first activity I've asked interns to do is to create a visual introduction of themselves and show their range of experiences and their network. Who knows! Maybe one will be related to the CEO of Hyundai or another firm that does business in the US. This is a graphic from another slide Song Mi created. As her friends and family and university network look at what she writes about the Tutor/Mentor Institute, LLC perhaps one or more will want to become a partner, sponsor, or another volunteer, helping us apply these ideas in Chicago, and helping them apply the ideas in Korea and other countries.

That's the goal of this network building.

Our interns come from a program at the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) in Chicago. They spend the first few months of their internship taking classes at IIT, then spend six weeks with a community organization. We've been lucky to have IIT interns for several years. This page shows some of the work that has been done.

As alumni, faculty and other students at IIT see this work we hope one will want to adopt the Tutor/Mentor Institute, LLC as a partner and perhaps even fund a program on campus that continues this work well into the future.

It's all about network-building.

Networking Strategy of Tutor/Mentor Connection

Visit the Tutor/Mentor Connection form and see the work interns and volunteers are doing to help Tutor/Mentor Connection reach more people who might become leaders, volunteers and donors in support of volunteer-based tutor/mentor programs in many cities. This graphic is a new interpretation of a graphic posted in this blog article.

Animation communicates idea in new way

This graphic is from this animated video created by Sam Lee, an intern from IIT working with the Tutor/Mentor Connection.

Spring 2011 Interns add new talent

This graphic was created by Sam Lee, a new intern from IIT working at the Tutor/Mentor Connection this spring. She read this blog article, then created this interpretation.

Interns from many colleges and high schools can be doing similar interpretations. As they post them to their own blogs and the T/MC forum we can draw more attention to the ideas and more support to volunteer-based tutor/mentor programs in many cities.

Contact the T/MC if you'd like to be involved.