The words tutor mentor and education-to-careers have different meanings to the thousands of stakeholders involved in the tutor/mentor movement.

This makes it difficult to create a well-understood value, or a set of shared actions that would increase resources for programs within this movement.

The Tutor/Mentor Connection (T/MC) focuses its efforts on inner-city youth living near poorly performing schools or neighborhoods with high concentrations of poverty and segregation.

Since 1993 the T/MC has been constantly searching for new examples of Best Practice work to share through this web site. These examples are intended to provide choices that any leader, volunteer, youth, parent or donor can use improve the quality of any tutor/mentor program in any neighborhood or city.

As an operator of a Cabrini- Green area tutor/mentor program, we are constantly searching for best practices to help us improve our own work. Borrowing from the good ideas of others has always made more sense to us than attempting to reinvent the wheel!.

At the same time, we created the T/MC as a vehicle to share our own long-term experience as a model that others might follow. There are several million children and youth who live in poverty. They all need best practice tutor/mentor programs. Sharing what we know and what others are learning can lead to the growth of quality programs.

Drawing from our own experiences in addition to models of success such as Big Brothers/Big Sisters and the Quantum Opportunities Program, we've combined the terms tutor mentor and education-to-careers into a single blueprint that engages adult volunteers as mentors, tutors and change-agents in the lives of inner-city kids. We call it Total Quality Mentoring.

IF YOU HAVE VISITED TMC WEB SITES IN THE PAST, YOU'LL SEE THAT WE HAVE NOT CHANGED THE BASIC MESSAGE AND VISUAL IMAGES

That's because the need has not changed. Neither has the commitment for all stakeholders to work together to help more and better mentoring-to-career programs be available in every poverty neighborhood and near every poorly performing school in America. Unless we find a better graphic to illustrate this vision, we'll continue to use the same maps and charts to illustrate these concepts. We welcome submission of web site links that would illustrate this Total Quality Mentoring strategy in different ways.

The Total Quality Mentoring chart shows that a full range of learning experiences need to be available at the PUBLIC SCHOOL during the school day. But it also shows that these learning experiences need to be available in the AFTERSCHOOL HOURS. Furthermore, as the next illustration shows, the afterschool hours break into two distinct time frames.

While great learning opportunities and safe places where kids and volunteers can meet are needed during the school day and immediately after school, these time frames will never attract enough adult mentors to build one-on-one relationships with the 15 million at-risk kids who most need these types of relationships. The workplace will never be able to release that many people.

That means the third time frame is needed. Volunteers and children need to be able to connect in the afterwork timeframe, at business sites, at churches, at youth centers and at colleges, where programs can offer a wide diversity of experiences, mentors and opportunities.

How many Tutor/Mentor Programs are needed?

The following chart shows three maps of Chicago. The chart to the far left shows the highest concentrations of poverty in the city. The middle chart shows the locations of over 100 schools placed on probation because reading scores were so low. The chart to the right shows the location of afterschool tutor/mentor programs working to help kids.

The charts shown above are just a few from the T/MC library. Visit the Tutor/Mentor Institute and you can find power point essays that illustrate these concepts in a variety of ways. If you’re an expert in animation, visual databases, etc., we invite you to partner with the T/MC to illustrate these concepts in ways that are easier to understand.

While the Chicago newspapers have devoted dozens headlines and feature stories to school reform and the poor performance of schools, they have yet to publish a map showing the distribution of poverty in the city along with the distribution of schools on probation. This chart not only shows this relationship, it also shows the distribution of afterschool tutor/mentor programs in Chicago and quantifies the number of children served by these programs.

In total, fewer than 6% of Chicago's school-age population is reached by the 272 youth services organizations who responded to a 1997 study conducted by Human Capital Research Corporation. In Region 2, there are 103,069 children between the ages of 6 and 18 (1990 census), with fewer than 5,000 in known tutor/mentor programs. In Region 3, there are 59,332 children between the ages of 6 and 18, with fewer than 7,200 in known tutor/mentor programs. In Region 4, less than 5,700 of nearly 101,000 children are enrolled in tutor/mentor programs. In Region 5, less than 6,000 children out of a total of more than 107,000 school-aged children are enrolled in these programs..

Clearly a powerful and sustained marketing effort is needed to help existing programs grow and attract more children, while helping new programs grow in areas where there are now no programs, or no programs serving particular age groups (middle school or high school, for example).

Summary: Visit the Tutor/Mentor Institute and you can read a variety of power point essays that illustrate these concepts.

These maps, charts and the survey of tutor/mentor programs in Chicago are the result of work done by the Tutor/Mentor Connection since 1993. While many value this work, we have yet to find enough consistent funds from any set of donors to do the surveys annually, to tabulate the results, or to produce maps that show this information on a daily basis.

If you value the work we’re doing, please become a donor or partner to help us do it more consistently and with greater impact.