April-May 2025 T/M News

Last month my headline talked about finding alternative sources of information if websites shut down. Wow. I did not realize my main website would be not working since early April. If you tried to visit, it's now working again.

The site still needs to be upgrades, so may be closed to you at some point in coming weeks. If that happens, please read the blogs and look at other websites that I point to.

Use the ideas and resources I share to help you build and sustain mentor-rich, school and non-school, tutor, mentor and learning programs that reach K-12 youth in all areas of persistent poverty. These resources can be used by anyone, in Chicago, or around the world.

Please share this so others in your city can find and use these resources!

In 2017 I posted a video of a Pope Francis TED talk on the Tutor/Mentor blog. At one point in the video he talks about the responsibility for each of us to take on the role of the Good Samaritan, to help others who are in need. At another he talks about HOPE, as "a humble, hidden seed of life that within time will develop into a large tree."

And he said, "A single individual is enough for HOPE to exist, and that individual can be YOU."

I support volunteer-based tutor/mentor programs because a single volunteer can bring so much HOPE into the life of a youth. An organized, long-term program, can bring HOPE to dozens of kids.

You can find the video at this link.

Challenges to our sector. Invitation to philanthropy.

The Tutor/Mentor Connection was created in 1993 to help draw volunteers, ideas and operating dollars to every youth serving tutor, mentor and learning program in the Chicago region. With government threats for funding of nonprofits Vu Le wrote an article titled "Funders, here's the blueprint for saving democracy."

I wrote about it in this article. Follow the links. Share the message.

Part of the Tutor/Mentor Connection strategy has been to aggregate research showing where tutor/mentor programs were most needed and why. In April the "State of Chicago Youth 2025" report was released.

View this Tutor/Mentor blog article and see how I shared the link to the "State of Chicago Youth" report and pointed to other research that I've been aggregating. Use the information in your own articles, videos, newsletters and events to educate volunteers, donors and business partners to be more proactive in providing the long-term funding needed by tutor, mentor and learning programs in many places.

Resources to help organizations find funding.

Having led a volunteer-based tutor/mentor program as a non-profit, from 1990 to 2011, I'm very aware of the constant challenge smaller organizations have of finding 100% of the operating dollars they need to build and sustain constantly improving programs. That's one reason I created the Tutor/Mentor Connection in 1993.

In April 2025 I watched a webinar hosted by the Children's Funding Project, which I was unaware of until then. Above is one of the slides from the presentation. It shows their role of helping organizations "fill the gap between current funding and the true cost of reaching their goals". You can view the video at this link. View the slides on this page.

Read this article on the Wallace Foundation website, describing the Children's Funding Project. The title is "Investing in Youth From "Cradle to Career".

Here's another important resource. The Independent Sector has created a page titled "Tracking the Policy Landscape for the Charitable Sector" to respond to Federal actions that are causing fear and chaos in the social sector, and elsewhere. Three sets of information are being tracked: 1) Tax and Federal Legislation; 2) Litigation; 3) Executive Actions. Click here

This is one of many resources that can be found in the Philanthropy Links section of the Tutor/Mentor Library. Make sure your staff and volunteers are making time to learn from these.

Follow up to 1997 President's Summit for America's Future

How are you celebrating the end of this school year?

I led two different volunteer-based tutor/mentor programs between 1975 and 2011.

The first was called the Montgomery Ward/Cabrini-Green Tutoring Program when I joined it in 1973 as a volunteer and became its leader in 1975. It served second to 6th grade students and while volunteers originally were mostly from the Montgomery Ward corporate headquarters in Chicago, by 1992 only 10% of the 550 volunteers were Ward employees.

The second, called Cabrini Connections, served 7th to 12th grade kids, most of whom had started with the "little kid" program, then came to us after 6th grade. The photo above shows 6th grade graduates of the first program in 1990. Many came to the second program. I'm still connected to many of them on Facebook, watching them raise their own kids and share their own joys and sorrows.

We celebrated the end of every year with a year-end graduation celebration for the kids and their parents and volunteers. From 1975 to 1990 we also were hosted by Montgomery Ward corporate officers at a volunteer recognition dinner.

Read this article to see some of the yearbooks and annual reports from these programs.

Over the next few week's I'll see posts from programs I follow on social media, showing their year end celebrations. You can follow the same programs I follow by looking up programs that I host on lists on the left side of the http://www.tutormentorexchange.net website.

How will you celebrate? Post your year-end celebrations on social media. If you see posts by other youth serving organizations, give them a boost. Together we can raise the visibility for each of us.

Thank you for reading.

Please share this newsletter with people you know who work in non-school youth serving programs, or in sectors that should be strategically supporting such programs, such as business, philanthropy, education and public policy. If they are not receiving these newsletters then we have no way of engaging them. Also encourage friends, family, co-workers to sign up to receive this newsletter.

I encourage others to duplicate what I'm doing. Write a blog and share your own vision, strategy and challenges. Share your link and I'll add it to this list in the Tutor/Mentor library.

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