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| Making Volunteers: Civic Life after Welfare's End |
From the web site:
"Volunteering improves inner character, builds community, cures poverty, and prevents crime. We've all heard this kind of empowerment talk from nonprofit and government-sponsored civic programs. But what do these programs really accomplish? In Making Volunteers, Nina Eliasoph offers an in-depth, humorous, wrenching, and at times uplifting look inside youth and adult civic programs. She reveals an urgent need for policy reforms in order to improve these organizations and shows that while volunteers learn important lessons, they are not always the lessons that empowerment programs aim to teach.
With short-term funding and a dizzy mix of mandates from multiple sponsors, community programs develop a complex web of intimacy, governance, and civic life. Eliasoph describes the at-risk youth served by such programs, the college-bound volunteers who hope to feel selfless inspiration and plump up their resumés, and what happens when the two groups are expected to bond instantly through short-term projects. She looks at adult "plug-in" volunteers who, working in after-school programs and limited by time, hope to become like beloved aunties to youth. Eliasoph indicates that adult volunteers can provide grassroots support but they can also undermine the family-like warmth created by paid organizers. Exploring contradictions between the democratic rhetoric of empowerment programs and the bureaucratic hurdles that volunteers learn to navigate, the book demonstrates that empowerment projects work best with less precarious funding, more careful planning, and mandatory training, reflection, and long-term commitments from volunteers.
Based on participant research inside civic and community organizations, Making Volunteers illustrates what these programs can and cannot achieve, and how to make them more effective.
Nina Eliasoph is associate professor of sociology at the University of Southern California. She is the author of Avoiding Politics. | | Hits: 240 | Report Broken Link | |
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| Mentor Me! The Complete Guide for Women Who want to Mentor Girls |
One of the testimonials on the web site for this book says “Mentor Me! is a fantastic book, an intelligently written, comprehensive guide to mentoring girls that is both highly practical and deeply inspirational. I loved how it reveals the life-changing power of mentoring from both the mentor’s and mentee’s perspective. I eagerly look forward to sharing it with others!" | | Hits: 1 | Report Broken Link | |
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| MyTutorOnline |
Live online whiteboard classes for math science english with email and live chat support for problems and homework forum for posting problems. | | Hits: 2126 | Report Broken Link | |
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| A List to Find Fee-based Tutors in Your City |
From the site:
"This site is for people looking for a private tutor or music teacher to search through our list of tutors in cities around the world. We also have a good deal of advice for parents, students, and tutors.
Tutors can sign up free and there is no spam because your email is not listed (unless requested); we only list your phone number. Tutors can also send a resume to be made public for the parents and students to view." | | Hits: 547 | Report Broken Link | |
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| A School Reform Reading List | This points to a blog article post where a number of books are recommended for those who really want to educate themselves to understand the challenges and opportunities of improving the public education system. | | Hits: 553 | Report Broken Link | |
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| Blessed Unrest - Organizing from Bottom Up | From web site: "Paul Hawken has spent over a decade researching organizations dedicated to restoring the environment and fostering social justice. From billion-dollar nonprofits to single-person dot.causes, these groups collectively comprise the largest movement on earth, a movement that has no name, leader, or location, and that has gone largely ignored by politicians and the media. Like nature itself, it is organizing fr om the bottom up, in every city, town, and culture. and is emerging to be an extraordinary and creative expression of people's needs worldwide.
Blessed Unrest explores the diversity of the movement, its brilliant ideas, innovative strategies, and hidden history, which date back many centuries. A culmination of Hawken's many years of leadership in the environmental and social justice fields, it will inspire and delight any and all who despair of the world's fate, and its conclusions will surprise even those within the movement itself. Fundamentally, it is a description of humanity's collective genius, and the unstoppable movement to reimagine our relationship to the environment and one another."
Meet author Paul Hawkin at http://www.paulhawken.com/paulhawken_frameset.html | | Hits: 347 | Report Broken Link | |
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| Closing the Literacy Gap in American Business | The authors present their perspectives on workplace literacy past, present, and future and describe how twenty-first-century technology produced America's "literacy gap." The book reviews strengths and weaknesses of current literacy programs, and discusses research on difficult employee literacy problems. Actual case studies describe Individualized Instructional Programs (IIP) for hourly workers, support staff, managers, and professionals. It includes a game plan on how to establish company "Work Force Education" policy and offers multi-level, cost justified programs. Finally, international responses to workplace literacy are considered, along with the development of employee literacy into the next century. | | Hits: 2866 | Report Broken Link | |
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| Cognitive Surplus |
From the wiki:
"The book's central theme is that people are now learning how to use more constructively the free time afforded to them since the 1940s for creative acts rather than consumptive ones, particularly with the advent of online tools that allow new forms of collaboration.[1] It goes on to catalog the means and motives behind these new forms of cultural production, as well as key examples."
Referred to in this blog article by Vance Stevens: http://advanceducation.blogspot.com/2011/05/how-cognitive-surplus-drives-us-to.html | | Hits: 46 | Report Broken Link | |
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| Education Industry Association - guide for parents |
EIA has prepared a guide for parents to help choose tutor and learning supports.
From the web site:
"EIA serves as the leading voice for education entrepreneurs, advocating for the interests of businesses in the PreK – 12 market and serving as the knowledge center which integrates best practices and research that raise student achievement through innovation and improvement strategies." | | Hits: 2238 | Report Broken Link | |
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| Expert Support from The Literacy Ambassador | With over 13 years of experience training tutors and consulting with tutoring leadership, Cathy Puett Miller stands ready to equip your volunteer or paid tutors with proven methods. Training includes her 84 Tips and Techniques for Tutors. This company focuses on a framework that teaches you how to evaluate, integrate, adjust and adapt your program to the needs of the students and the schools it serves. Contact us at our website or by emailing tla@readingisforeveryone.org (SUBJECT LINE Tutoring). | | Hits: 8825 | Report Broken Link | |
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| Here Comes Everybody, by Clay Shirky |
From Wikipedia:
"Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations is a book by Clay Shirky published by Penguin Press in 2008, which evaluates the effect of the Internet on modern group dynamics. The author considers examples such as Wikipedia and MySpace in his analysis." | | Hits: 45 | Report Broken Link | |
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| Hope and Despair in the American City | Hope and Despair in the American City: Why There Are No Bad Schools in Raleigh, written by Gerald Grant
This book is a compelling study of urban social policy that combines field research and historical narrative in lucid and engaging prose. The result is an ambitious portrait—sometimes disturbing, often inspiring—of two cities that exemplify our nation’s greatest educational challenges, as well as a passionate exploration of the potential for school reform that exists for our urban schools today.
Join discussion about this book by Gerald Grant | | Hits: 1316 | Report Broken Link | |
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| How to Change the World - Social Entrepreneurs |
This link provides several publications and books, including information about a book titled How to Change the World: Social Entrepreneurs and the Power of New Ideas. I read this in Jan/Feb 07 and it's a powerful motivator and poses some challenges that are similar to those we address via the Tutor/Mentor Connection. | | Hits: 2940 | Report Broken Link | |
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