Business recognizes girls as formidable new force

This week's article of Crain's Chicago Business features a story showing how girls are becoming high powered social activists.

I have written several articles in the past showing how young people can take on activist roles, motivating adults to do more than what they do now to help kids have safe places, good schools, and access to jobs and careers.

All of the graphics and videos shown on this blog, and this page, were done by college interns. However, these could have been done by middle school and high school students.

Let's recruit more young people to create and lead campaigns that make mentor rich youth programs available in all of the high poverty neighborhoods where the are needed.

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.

If we want to help kids through school...

This is a new presentation created by Byeonghui Kim, an intern from IIT who has been working with Tutor/Mentor Connection for the past two weeks. This communicates strategy that was first outlined in this PDF.

See the full presentation here.

By presenting this information in a new format we hope more people will look at it and adopt the strategy in their own efforts to help kids in high poverty neighborhoods have the adult support networks they need to move more successfully to jobs and careers. This type of work can be done by teens and college students, or business volunteers, anywhere in the world. The ideas can be applied to any city. Visit this group to join in this effort.

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.

Videos Created By Interns

Since 2005 interns from Korea, China and local universities have been creating visualizations and videos to communicate the ideas and strategies of the Tutor/Mentor Connection and to draw volunteers and donors to programs like Cabrini Connections.

This page was created to serve as a library of these. I hope you'll visit and share these ideas. I also hope that youth from high schools, collages, non-school tutor/mentor programs and other organizations will create their own videos, with the same ideas and call-to-action, drawing volunteers and donors to youth organizations in every part of Chicago, and every city in the country.

New Assignment. A Quest!

I've created a variety of PDF essays that are intended to help people learn ways to support the growth of volunteer-based tutoring, mentoring and learning programs in high poverty neighborhoods. While these can be read on line, I've also presented them to students and volunteers. Going through this information using the PDF can be quite boring. So I've been looking for new ways to introduce these concepts. This is an animation I made to introduce this concept. View on YouTube

Here are a couple of other animations introducing students to a web quest.

Making a map, class assignment, animation.

Doing a web quest.

Look at work interns have done in the past to guide people through this information. As new projects are created we will add them to our web sites, and they become tools students can use to bring more people together in their own neighborhoods to do the work of building and sustaining mentor-rich non-school programs. Try it!

Expanding Networks Supporting Inner City Youth

This is a presentation done in May-June 2011 by Interns from Illinois Institute of Technology. It is an example of the type of work youth in high schools and colleges throughout the country could be doing to help solve complex social problems. Social Network Analysis - Mapping growth of a Network Visit the Tutor/Mentor Connection Intern group and add yourself to this project.

Introduction of Tutor/Mentor Institute, LLC

This presentation was created by IIT intern Mina Song in May-June 2012 using Prezi.com

View T/MC Intro presentation on Prezi  This is one of five presentations created by Mina. You can see all five on this page.

Students Sparking Global Thinking

In the articles on this blog you can see how interns have been looking at ideas that I originally launched in the Tutor/Mentor Institute, LLC blog or in Power Point essays and then creating new visualizations to interpret these ideas in their own words. Visit the Intern Project pages for Spring 2012, Winter 2012, Spring 2011 to see how I coach this process.

I've been reading a book by Curt Bonk, titled The World is Open and it is providing me with a wide range of ideas for sharing information and supporting on-going learning of students and adults from any part of the world.

In Chapter 6 of the book he shows how millions of people are sharing ideas on platforms like YouTube. In one example he described how a power point presentation created by a teacher in Colorado had been viewed by more than 10 million people. This is that first presentation.

After the first version of the PPT was created and viewed by thousands of people others began to remix the video for their own purposes and locals. This is a version created by a professor at the University of Minnesota.

Because of the ways that many people have shared the original video others have created versions that many more people have viewed and shared. Bonk writes in the book "With the participatory power of the Web 2.0, one person in a high school setting in Colorado could now spark global thinking as related to school change ---not from a book or a series of speeches, but from a compelling six-minute video posted to the Internet."

In this page I describe a goal of students from throughout the world constantly creating and sharing new versions of the ideas I've originated over the past 18 years of leading a tutor/mentor program in Chicago and a strategy intended to help mentor-rich learning programs be available to youth in every high poverty neighborhood.

One chapter of The World is Open talks about the rise of open source technology and how universities are now putting their entire curriculum on the web for anyone in the world to access it.

Bonk writes "today a thought or idea can truly make an impact on anyone anywhere on the planet. It might not be today or tomorrow when that thought or idea is needed. However, once posted on the Web, it will likely be reflected upon or employed by someone sometime in the future."

Students and faculty who look at the ideas I've shared and who remix those ideas as part of their own learning and sharing can be part of this movement. Our collective thinking can be the catalyst for new and innovative strategies that increase the distribution of high quality learning and mentoring to young people in more places.

Browse through this blog and visit this page to see some of the projects that have been done. Join the Tutor/Mentor forum and become a part of this process.

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.

Unleashing Power of Young People

This video has had 19 million views. If you browse the articles on this blog you'll see that interns and volunteers from a variety of universities have been creating graphics, videos, blog articles, etc. intended to show adults ways to help kids in poverty neighborhoods. This needs to be an ongoing effort by young people and adults in many neighborhoods, cities and countries. It needs to support a year-round mobilization of people, ideas and resources that are distributed to thousands of places around the world. This graphic illustrates how events that repeat year-after-year can increase the number of people involved and the dollars available to help tutor/mentor programs be available to youth in more places.

When I was working in corporate advertising for a major retailer in the 1980s we spent $250 million a year to attract customers to over 400 stores in 40 states. None of us in the non profit sector have that type of advertising so we need to innovate other ways to get our story in front of a growing number of people every day. Young people can be part of this solutions, and in the process they can learn to be leaders and problem solvers. At the June 14, 2012 Tutor/Mentor Conference we are organizing a panel where programs can show how young people are raising their voices for social justice. If you have such a program and would like to share, please visit the conference web site and introduce yourself to us.

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.

Unleash Student Talent to Motivate Change

This flash animation was created in 2008 by a team of students at Indiana University. It shows the need for volunteer-based tutor/mentor programs in many neighborhoods of Chicago and the need for leaders in business to support them. This is a graphic from this animation, which introduced the Tutor/Mentor Program Locator in 2008. It was created in one week by an intern from the University of Michigan!

Two new interns are joining me this week. You can follow their work on this Ning forum. You can even join in if you want to unleash your own talent to make good things happen in Chicago or other places.

Spring 2012 Intern Projects with Tutor/Mentor Institute, LLC

I'm beginning to interview new interns for Spring 2012 projects. Read my introduction on the Tutor/Mentor Connection forum.

On Scribd.com I've been posting articles showing ways young people can get involved, such as this and this.

To have the collective impact we want student and intern groups from many high schools and colleges around the country need to become involved with the Tutor/Mentor Connection intern project, not just the 2 or 3 students who are able to participate every six months.

Join the Tutor/Mentor Connection forum and introduce yourself if you'd like to take a role, or become a financial supporter of this project.

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.

New Interns for Jan-Feb 2012

We have two new interns from IIT and Korea working with the Tutor/Mentor Institute, LLC this Jan/Feb. They are Song Mi Lee (Stella) and Sung Hee Jung (Jade). This graphic is from an introduction Jade created to show her experiences and her network.

Our goal with these internships is to share the thinking of the Tutor/Mentor Institute, LLC with our interns so that they can then communicate our ideas in their own visual presentations to people in their own networks.

I support this process in this Korea-Chicago group on Ning (most of our interns have been from Korea, but others have come from China and India).

I'm also trying to find interns, researchers, partners and volunteers for this Social Network Analysis group. The graphic that Jade created shows her to be part of a network. The students who have been interns in the past six years are also potentially part of a network as are the students and volunteers who have been part of the tutor/mentor programs I've led since 1975.

If we can harness social network analysis tools we can create a better understanding of the growth of this network over a period of years and we can connect the members of the network to each other in a social problem solving platform where they can each help each other while drawing from all of the information and ideas that we have been aggregating for so many years.

If you'd like to join in or be a sponsor or help in other ways just introduce yourself in the Tutor/Mentor Connection forum.