Helping Kids in Poverty Find Work

Debategraph connected recently with Dan Bassill, founder and president of the Tutor/Mentor Institute LLC and the Tutor/Mentor Connection.

Dan has been working with inner-city youth in Chicago for more than 36 years and also had a 17 year career in corporate advertising with the historic Montgomery Ward Corporation.

Drawing on his advertising experience, Dan began to address the challenge of helping kids in poverty from a business innovation and marketing perspective, rather than social work or youth education perspective.

In the guest blog below, Dan reflects on some of the lessons learned and challenges ahead, and invites you add your voice to the conversation on the Helping kids born in poverty start jobs and careers Debategraph:

I believe that there are four concurrent strategies that could be applied in every major city in the world as part of a set of collective on-going actions to help reduce the costs of poverty in each city.

(1) Knowledge aggregation and visualization: The Tutor/Mentor Institute has been collecting information since 1993, showing where volunteer-based tutor/mentor programs are needed, why they are needed, what different programs do, and why business, philanthropy and others should support the growth of such programs as a strategy for expanding social capital surrounding youth in high poverty neighborhoods of large cities like Chicago, New York, and London. Aggregating and sharing the accumulated knowledge and insights can help the whole community to make faster and more effective progress – and save people from having to “reinvent the wheel” each time a new initiative starts. Using interactive sites like Debategraph, new ideas can be added to the library on an on-going basis, and embedded on the websites of any stakeholder organization around the world – allowing others to discover and build on innovative local solutions to poverty, poorly performing schools, drop out programs and workforce development that have already been implemented elsewhere.

The Tutor/Mentor Institute has also been experimenting with interactive geographical maps that can be used to locate tutor/mentor programs in specific parts of Chicago, and to determine the level of program availability in all parts of the city; making it easy for parents, volunteers and donors, as well as corporate leaders, city planners, marketers and policy makers to connect with the programs.

(2) Increasing public awareness: getting information is just the first challenge, getting millions of people to look at this information and use it in their own actions, is a bigger challenge. While I was working at Montgomery Ward our weekly ads drew shoppers to more than 400 stores, across 40 US states. Since no non-profit has the type of advertising budgets that large corporations have, we have to find creative and engaging ways to draw attention to tutoring/mentoring and the information hosted by the Tutor/Mentor Institute and others. One strategy for creating public awareness has been to organize events such as Tutor/Mentor Leadership and Networking Conferences, held every May and November since 1994. Such events draw 100-150 leaders and stakeholders together in Chicago but create much larger visibility during the months building up to the event. Forums like Debategraph enable the Tutor/Mentor Connection to connect its ideas to people in cities all over the world and to build on the contacts and dialogue between the conferences.

(3) Creating learning circles. Facilitating understanding: The amount of information is overwhelming. That’s an obstacle that can be overcome if volunteers are recruited to help others navigate and learn to use the resources of the library. The Tutor/Mentor Institute focuses on structured, volunteer-based tutor/mentor programs as a core part of its strategy because of the way such programs connect volunteers from the business community and who live beyond poverty with youth who do live in poverty. An organized tutor/mentor program can be a collective effort of many extra people working to help kids grow up. As volunteers stay with youth for one or more years many begin to bond and take on roles similar to “surrogate parents”. Such people become advocates and do much more to help the kids, and the tutor/mentor programs they are part of. Over time such people can become full-time advocates for expanded strategies to help poor kids to careers.

As we aggregate more and more information and increase the number of people who engage with the Tutor/Mentor Institute web sites, there also needs to be a process of facilitation, where people who know more about the information available in the knowledge base help others find and understand the information. In Chicago Interns have been writing blog articles and creating visualizations to help build understanding of this information. If you would be interested in volunteering as intern or discussion leader online, please let me know.

(4) Accelerating the flow of resources: The first three steps create a positive feedback loop as more people begin to use their time, talent and resources to support one or more tutor/mentor programs and, in turn, draw more people and resources into the movement in cities around the world. The information we share can be used by anyone, and the way we innovate public awareness strategies to motivate people to look at this information regularly, and to motivate people to act as volunteers and donors, can sustain this effort for many years into the future.

This not something that was created by the Mayor, the President or funded by a massive government or private foundation grant. The ideas in the Tutor/Mentor Institute were developed over a period of 35 years in response to what we learned as we struggled each year to find resources to operate one single small tutor/mentor program in Chicago. We have demonstrated the potential of the Internet, where people who “don’t have power, don’t have celebrity standing, and are not the elected leaders of a region can put their own ideas for building a better world on the Internet and invite others to join with them in making those ideas a reality.

It’s an idea in tune with our times: and if the idea of helping kids in poverty find work appeals to you, you are welcome to join us.

What should Obama do Next? The Independent series launches…

In the build up to Obama’s inauguration on 20th January 2009, The Independent and Debategraph have teamed up to give the world a chance to map and explore what Obama should do next. Click here for the map.

Over the next 10 weeks, Independent readers and the Debategraph team will develop a series of interrelated debate maps of the key policy and political questions facing Obama as he prepares for office.

Whether it’s tackling the global financial crisis, deciding who to appoint to key cabinet posts, or determining how to proceed on climate change, Iraq or the crisis in the Congo, you are welcome to join us in building comprehensive maps of the political choices open to Obama, the arguments for and against the different options, and the path you think Obama should follow.

Each week, we’ll be seeding the maps with an article from The Independent or The Independent on Sunday and beginning to layer in the positions and arguments from the Obama team’s published agenda and public statements.

You can watch the maps evolve in the build up to the inauguration, or better still register and begin to comment, suggest new issues, rate the options and arguments, and add new options and arguments of your own.

I’ll describe the process in more detail over the coming weeks, but for now we have seeded the opening map on The Independent’s website with the arguments from Philip Bobbitt’s article The flag-waving is over. This is how the president can change the world (examining some of the international policy options open to Obama), and Leonard Doyle’s Obama Starts to Build a ‘Team of Rivals’ (considering whether Obama should appoint Hillary Clinton as his Secretary of State).

Changing Climate: live blogging the Progressive Governance summit

Congratulations (and a relaxing Sunday) to Simon Dickson and the Downing Street digital team, for their phenomenal work on Policy Network’s Progressive Governance summit this morning.

At short notice, they produced an impressive and engaging microsite built around a live video stream, live blogging and comments, and immediate access to the summit papers. It was a perfect illustration of how lightweight web technology can transform the public experience of political gatherings of this kind; simultaneously demystifying proceedings and adding new layers of understanding—both about the content of the summit and, as Ellee Seymour notes, about the participants.

It was a courageous decision by all concerned to innovate rapidly in this fashion; a decision fully justified by the outcome. More soon, please.

View the full set of summit images are available here: http://progov.pm.gov.uk/see/photos/

The summit—which drew together Michelle Bachelet Jeria, Helen Clark, Bill Clinton, Kemal Dervis, Robert Fico, Alfred Gusenbauer, Antonio Guterres, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, Donald Kaberuka, Gediminas Kirkilas, John Agyekum Kufuor, Pascal Lamy, Peter Mandelson, Thabo Mbeki, Romano Prodi, Kevin Rudd, Javier Solana, Jens Stoltenberg, and Dominque Strauss-Kahn, as well as Gordon Brown—focused on globalisation, development, international institutions, and climate change, with practical calls to action on each theme summarised in the final communiqué.

I followed the session on climate change, and the accompanying paper by Nicholas Stern and Laurence Tubiana, Director-General of (IDDRI), with particular interest in the context of the climate change debate map that Debategraph is developing in collaboration with Mark Klein at the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence. Watch this space too, for emerging details of a broader international collaborative initiative on climate change deliberation.

Our early work in progress on the climate change map is embedded below, and we expect the map to move to a fully mature and comprehensive analysis of the global policy debate by the summer.

Anyone interested in participating in this process is welcome to contact us via email at david [at] debategraph [dot] org.