Each year the January National Mentoring Month celebrates the role mentors play in the lives of all of us. As we think of who has been our mentor, we ask you to focus attention on kids living in inner city neighborhoods where kids and families need extra mentors, and extra learning and experience opportunities in the non-school hours. These are places where tutor/mentor programs like Cabrini Connections are needed. In the Program Locator and Chicago Program Links sections of this web site you can find dozens of programs like Cabrini Connections. Each is constantly looking for resources (dollars, manpower, leaders, ideas, technology, etc.) that they can use to maintain connections between mentors and youth.

Learn how your company can recruit talent volunteers (PDF), to help build stronger tutor/mentor programs in Chicago and other cities. Learn ways you can be more consistent in connecting people in your network (pdf)  to tutor/mentor progams in your city.

Please consider a 2008 donation to the Cabrini Connections or to one of the other mentoring/tutoring organizations listed on our web site to help every tutor/mentor program in Chicago, and in other cities, continue this service in 2008 and beyond. Thank you.

This week two events are being held which connect college and business volunteers with inner city kids. You can read about these on the Tutor/Mentor Blog and the Cabrini Blog. 

Our use of blogs illustrates a strategy small non profits can use to tell their story and reach potential volunteers and donors. As you develop your Back-to-School Volunteer Recruitment Campaign, think of using a blog, and of linking your blog to the Tutor/Mentor Blog, as part of a strategy to get the attention of a greater number of potential volunteers.  Just email your web address to us, or introduce yourself with a comment on the Tutor/Mentor Blog or in the Discussion Forums on this site.

If you lead a business, professional group, health care organization, church or alumni group, and want to lead a strategy where you connect your network to tutor/mentor programs in Chicago or in your own community, email tutormentor2@earthlink.net for our help in developing this strategy.

Visit http://cabriniblog.blogspot.com and view photos from the 2007 year end dinner. This celebrates the 15th year of providing tutoring/mentoring to Cabrini Green youth.

View the Cabrini Connections, Tutor/Mentor Connection timeline and see how this organization has grown from the vision of a few volunteers.  Click on the 1965 to 1992 timeline to see how this vision started more than 40 years ago.

This week Daniel F. Bassill, President, CEO and Founder of the Tutor/Mentor Connection and Cabrini Connections is the featured interview on the Blau Exchange web site, hosted by Paul DiPerna.  The Interview can be found at http://www.blauexchange.org/int_dbassill.html 

The Blau Exchange Project is a web-based initiative that will be an intermediary for professional groups interested in how information and communications technologies (ICTs) affect society, with particular focus on the Internet and World Wide Web.  This project honors Peter Blau, one of the 20th century's most influential sociologists.

Many of the current and past volunteers of Cabrini Connections have attended graduate business schools at Northwestern, University of Chicago or other institutions.  Some of these volunteers have helped us launch the Tutor/Mentor Connection. Others now serve on our board of directors.

For many years I've attempted to connect volunteers and leaders of different tutor/mentor programs in a network that shares ideas and applies their talents to building and sustaining programs like Cabrini Connections in high poverty neighborhoods throughout Chicago.  While we'd like to connect lawyers, accountants, engineers, etc. with each other, connecting business school students and alumni creates a marketing and advertising resource that is missing in most non profit tutor/mentor programs.

Since 1998 the T/MC has been using the Internet to share information and recruit partners, thus, our goal has expanded to connecting business school students and alumni from other cities, and even other countries.

Up until now we've not had anyone to take on this vision, and make it a reality. That has changed.

In January 2007 a Net Impact Fellow, Nithya Rajan, joined us from the University of Chicago Graduate Business School, to take a lead on this project.  I encourage you to read her  introduction and then review the vision of the Business School Connection.

I encourage you to share Nithya's introduction with friends, family and alumni who are currently attending a graduate business school. Help draw others into this project. Help Nithya make this project a reality.