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.

Service Learning Loop Shows how Volunteer Grows

In 2007 our second intern from Hong Kong Baptist University, Paul Wei, began to learn to use flash to create animated interpretations of ideas of the Tutor/Mentor Connection. He was not able to complete this project or add a voice-track before he left.

During Jan-Feb 2011 In Hee Cho, an intern from IIT in Chicago, took on this project and created this interpretation.

Note: As of 2017 Flash Animation presentations such as this one, can no longer be viewed on most browsers. You can download a swfplayer and still view them. However, I've created this video so you can still see the presentation. 

We hope that many people will look at this and other work done by interns in past years. Through these projects we hope to create new ways to interpret our ideas and motivate more people to adopt them in their own efforts to help inner city youth have the support systems needed to move to jobs and careers.

If your high school or college would like to work with T/MC on these projects, or if your company or foundation can be a sponsor, there is much we can do to provide ideas and guidance that any one in the world might use.

Leadership Pyramid - IIT Intern Project

Today was the last day of the Jan-Feb 2011 internship of Jongseop Won who came to us via IIT and his university in Korea. Here's the information we provided to guild Jonseop in working on this project.

This flash animation is his interpretation.

As others look at this information we hope they see how important it is to have intermediaries like the Tutor/Mentor Connection collecting information and supporting decisions and actions of volunteers and leaders throughout the Chicago region.

Interns creativity on display

Jongseop Won is one of our winter 2011 interns from Illinois Institute of Technology. This graphic shows how he is creating a new interpretation of the pyramid that the T/MC includes in this "building a network of purpose" essay. Visit this page to follow his progress on this project. Follow the work being done by interns from IIT, Adler School of Professional Psychology, National Louis University and beyond.

The T/MC ideas that are originated as sketches then converted to power point can be interpreted in many ways by students working at high schools and colleges throughout the world. Contact us if you'd like to be involved.

New Interns at CC, T/MC

This graphic was the way Cho In Hee introduced herself today in the Tutor/Mentor Connection on-line Forum.

She and Jongseop Won are starting six week internships with Cabrini Connections, Tutor/Mentor Connection. They will be creating visualizations to help communicate T/MC ideas to leaders all over the world who might understand the T/MC through these presentations and reach out to support us in the ways suggested.

In addition, Joseph Kreul has also joined us this week, as part of a six month internship program sponsored by The Adler School of Professional Psychology

As each volunteer and intern goes through this service and learning loop we hope they know more about poverty and ways leaders need to provide consistent, long-term support to organizations helping kids grow up. We also hope they learn to share this with the colleges they represent, their friends and family, and with people who visit our web sites, so that more people will become involved because of what these students communicate during the time they are with us, or in the future.

You can see from this post that the service learning loop graphic was created by an intern from Hong Kong who was with us in 2007.

Happy Holidays from Cabrini Connections!

Click here to donate.

Give Hope this Holiday Season

The graphic in this holiday appeal was created by a volunteer who lived in Indiana when she did this project for us. It illustrates how volunteers and interns from many places are helping us share ideas that support the growth of volunteer-based tutor/mentor programs.

Each year we must find donors to support our efforts so we have a place for students, interns and volunteers to connect. Please send a donation or become a benefactor.

Please read our 2010 Holiday Appeal Letter and forward it to others who might help.

University Partnerships Wanted

Willow and Jenny were interns at Cabrini Connections, Tutor/Mentor Connection from late June to early August, 2010. They can from China, via a program hosted by Hong Kong Baptist University.

Read the article about university partnerships written by Bradley Troast. If you would like to work with Cabrini Connections, Tutor/Mentor Connection just email tutormentor2 at@earthlink dot net

Interns tell story in Chinese and Korean

Today is the last day of a seven-week internship for Jenny and Willow, who came to us through a program with Hong Kong Baptist University. Earlier this spring, two students from Korea, via IIT, were interns.

One of the ways this year's interns have helped us is by creating videos, in Chinese and Korean, to translate our message to people who don't speak English.

Jenny/Willow Video


Chuck/Mingsang Video

Find more videos like this on Tutor/Mentor Connection


We'd like to recruit interns and volunteers with Spanish, French and German language skills, and more volunteers from Korea and China. If we can convert Tutor/Mentor Connection ideas into different languages, more people will be able to use them, and more people from different parts of the world will add their own support to creating and implementing these strategies.

Thank you Willow, Jenny, Chuck and Mingsang!

International Connections

This photo shows interns from China and Korea who are helping Cabrini Connections, Tutor/Mentor Connection by sharing their time and talent with us this spring and summer.

Meet Jiwon Seo and Minsang Lee, both from Korea, and Liu Chong and Willow Yang Liuqing

Conference video created by Interns

The Tutor/Mentor Leadership and Networking Conference was held in Chicago on May 27 and 28, 2010. Our student interns from IIT and Korea, Minsang Lee and Jiwon Seo, took many photos. This presentation was created by Minsang Lee.


Find more videos like this on Tutor/Mentor Connection

Network Building: Role of Interns and Volunteers

This blog shows how interns from many colleges and universities have been helping Cabrini Connections, Tutor/Mentor Connection communicate its message to people who can respond as volunteers, leaders, technology support, donors, etc., helping our organization, but also helping any other tutor/mentor program in Chicago, or in other cities.

This graphic is one that illustrates this concept, and which may be converted into an animation by a future intern.



One of our recent interns was Jordan Merlo, a student at Loyola University. She just completed a 12-week intern, which was part of a class assignment. She had to write a final paper, which is posted here on her blog.

Our goal is that hundreds, or even thousands, of students in high schools, colleges and universities all over the world are writing blog articles like Jordan's, with the same goal, and the same topic. That will draw the daily attention of millions of potential volunteers and every day, and change the flow of philanthropy from one where non profits are all seeking food (funding) like fish in a bowl, to one where people who can help (volunteers/ donors/ etc.) are searching the Internet using systems like the Tutor/Mentor Program Locator to choose what city, what zip code, then what program, they want to help.

Jordan is just one blogger you'll find on our Ning site. In addition, if you visit the Cabrini Connections blog, you'll find links to blogs written by our own staff and volunteers.

Finally, if you visit the Tutor/Mentor Connection site, you'll find a long list of bloggers that we follow, who write about learning, fund raising, collaboration, and even tutoring and mentoring.

New project - posted by Li Li, from University of Michigan

This is a screen shot from a flash animation project created this week by Li Li, a graduate student from the University of Michigan. She was part of a one-week Alternative Spring Break Program.

Interns from IIT - Great Work!

Eunsoo Lee (KuDo - front right in photo) and Jawon Koo (Peter - front left in photo)are finishing their final week as interns with Cabrini Connections, Tutor/Mentor Connection. They have been working to create flash animation interpretations of ideas expressed in essays on the Tutor/Mentor Connection site. This Collaboration Goals essay was what they started with. They had to learn flash when they got to our site in late January. They've done that and created these projects in less than six weeks.



You can view the projects they created on this section of the Tutor/Mentor Institute site.

Eunsoo has been keeping a blog, and he says "I hope they don't forget me." We won't. Your project will be on our web site for people from all over the world to see. You're profile will stay on the Ning site, so you can continue to stay part of Cabrini Connections from where ever you go in the world.

Peter has started a second project, which will be posted here when completed.

It's amazing how much these students can do in so short a time. It shows how students from throughout the world could be creating projects like this in an effort to help educate volunteers and donors and public leaders on where and how they could help high poverty youth get the help they need to move to jobs and careers.

If you'd like to get students from your college or high school involved, just introduce yourself on the Tutor/Mentor Connection Ning site.

The others in this photo: Front, Toni Pullen (left); Nicole White (right). Back, from left: Bradley Troast, Daniel Bassill, El Da'Sheon Nix and Mike Trakan.

Interns using visualization to help communicate ideas

Below is a map created by Emily Gunn, an intern from Loyola University in Chicago, who is working with Cabrini Connections, Tutor/Mentor Connection. You can see this map, and the story Emily wrote here.

At the left is another project, being developed by Eunsoo Lee, an intern from Korea, by way of IIT in Chicago. Follow his work here. (Open this link and find a PowerPoint showing the steps in the graphic at the left. You can also see this at this link).

This is a third project that is in development, based on the graphics in the "Collaboration Goals" pdf. Jawon Koo is working on this and you can follow his project development here.

This type of work can be done by teams of students from high schools and universities in all parts of the world. If you'd like to work with Cabrini Connections, Tutor/Mentor Connection just introduce yourself with a post on this blog.

Learn more about Cabrini Connections

Find more photos like this on Tutor/Mentor Connection


E Wilson has joined us as a second intern from Loyola University in Chicago. You can read her introduction, and follow here blog articles on our Ning site.

Intern from Loyola University Chicago

Jordan Merlo is our newest intern. She's a student at Loyola University Chicago and will be writing articles about the work we do. Her goal is to learn how to be a force for social change, using the communications tools of social media.

As others read Jordan's articles, we hope some will be inspired to become volunteers and donors, while we hope others will see that they can write similar articles, and attract their own friends, family and alumni to the tutor/mentor movement.

Thank you for joining us Jordan.

2010 Interns at Cabrini Connections, Tutor/Mentor Connection

Over the past few years interns from various universities have worked at Cabrini Connections, Tutor/Mentor Connection, helping to create new versions of concepts that Dan Bassill, President of CC, T/MC creates as hand drawn sketches, or in Power Point graphics.

Because Dan is a "thinker" not a "designer" the talent of these students enhances the ideas, and is now beginning to convert them into animated presentations that can be viewed on T/MC web sites, or on YouTube.

In January 2010 we will have two new student interns joining from the Illinois Institute of Technology. In February we hope to have two students from the University of Michigan, as part of their week long Alternative Spring Break.

Thanks to a donation of Social Network Analysis software, and interns from Loyola University in Chicago, we also hope to be doing some new work to map the network of people and organizations who are connected by the T/MC to each other, and to our own goals and objectives. This week we'll be joined by another intern from Loyola, who will be writing some of these articles, attempting to share what we are doing with a growing network of people who help.

We could not support these interns if some volunteers did not donate dollars to help pay the rent and the expenses involved with Cabrini Connections, Tutor/Mentor Connection. If you'd like to help, just visit our TisTheSeason Holiday Fund Raising page to make your donation.

If you'd like to involve students from your high school or university, just introduce yourself or call 312-492-9614.

Spring 2009 Interns Create Animated Strategy and Resource maps

Note: Animations talked about below can be viewed in videos on this page.

From late May through early July three interns from the Illinois Institute of Technology worked at Cabrini Connections, Tutor/Mentor Connection. Shown here are Gun Woong Go and Sung Joong Kim (pictured with Toni Pullen of the T/MC). This was the fourth cycle of interns from IIT to volunteer time with Cabrini Connections in the past two years. KG and Karse's work followed up on work started in in January by Alan Yoo and Rack Hyu Shin.



This image is of a Strategy Map flash animation, created in February by Alan and Rack. They converted a concept map created by the Tutor/Mentor Connection (see here) into a flash animation, that enables visitors to drag their mouse over an image, and get information specific to that image. Between January and June the links in the strategy map had broken, so when Karse and KG began working on this project they first had to figure out how to deconstruct the original project, so they could rebuild it with new links. Then, working with Chris Warren, our 2008-09 NUPIP Fellow, they added a voice-over narration, so that when you click an image, a narrator tells you what you are seeing. This was a huge improvement to what had been started in January.



Then, KG and Karse created a second animation, this time showing the resources that the Tutor/Mentor Connection makes available through its web sites. This map points to the different sections in the T/MC Links library, while also showing the homework help section. This was the concept map that they converted.

This is pretty impressive work, and we hope that it helps visitors to our web sites find and use the resources we make available. Visit our Ning site to learn more about work that interns from Korea (via IIT and the University of Michigan) have been doing to help us help inner city kids in Chicago and beyond.

If you have a team of students interested in working with the Tutor/Mentor Connection (you don't need to be in Chicago) just contact us and let's talk of ways you can provide a learning experience, and a leadership and service opportunity, in one on-going project.