On May 31, 2007 Oprah Winfrey, Essence Cares and its partners (including the National Urban League, 100 Black Men of America, Inc., and YWCA), and MENTOR/National Mentoring Partnership launched a call for 1,000,000 new mentors.  View a video clip.

We hope that as this partnership raises visibility for mentoring, it will cause more people to view the infrastructure needed to make comprehensive, volunteer-based tutoring/mentoring programs more available to kids in every inner city neighborhood. That's the goal of the Tutor/Mentor Connection.

While a May announcement of a new campaign to recruit mentors is welcome, we hope it leads to more businesses, churches, hospitals and univertisit providing leadership needed in August to help mobilize volunteers as schools starts, and in November/December, to help  mobilize donors as the  year end holidays stimulate giving. If you'd like to support the Chicago campaign email tutormentor2@earthlink.net or call 312-492-9614.

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.

During a Public Policy Forum hosted in Chicago on 1/24/07, maps were  used to show the changing population trends and their implications for future services.  The research was created by the Chapin Hall Center for Children.  The T/MC has used maps for many years to show poverty demographics and locations of poorly performing schools as an indicator of need for tutor/mentor programs. The T/MC Program Locator includes a Map Gallery, and a searchable database that visitors can use to shop for programs in different parts of the Chicago region.

However, we've also built a GIS links library, with links to different organizations in the Chicago region and nationally who are using maps to create a better understanding of poverty as the root cause of many other social issues.  During the meeting today I invited the 300-plus participants to use the GIS links on our web site as a resource in their own planning and networking. In addition, I invited them to add additional links, showning other sites that use maps to provide a spatial understanding of important social issues.  I also invited people to tell share information about forums where people are using maps to share information, network and collaborate, so that all children in the Chicago region have equal opportunities for an education and a life out of poverty.

Finally, if you know of people who blog the issues that were discussed in today's forum, add your link to the T/MC links library or introduce this resource in the comments section of the Tutor/Mentor Blog.

During January you'll see national advertising featuring celebrities like Clint Eastwood, which are part of the National Mentoring Month Campaign.  You can read about the campaign in my Tutor/Mentor Blog

While the media are shining the spotlight on mentoring, I'd like to know who is blogging about mentoring. Who is telling stories of tutors/mentors connecting with inner city kids, like we do at the Cabrini Blog?

Or, who is talking about the challenges that keep good tutor/mentor programs from being available in all of the neighborhoods where such programs are needed? 

If you write a blog on these topics, please post the link on this web site, or introduce your blog to me and others, by adding a comment on the Tutor/Mentor Blog

If we aggregate these stories, we can draw volunteers and donors to volunteer-based tutor/mentor programs in more places. We can also keep the focus on mentoring programs during the other eleven months of the year when the National Mentoring Month is not active.