Maps at the November Tutor/Mentor Leadership and Networking Conferences

A couple times each year, Cabrini Connections and Tutor/Mentor Connection organize a local conference of folks who are involved with, or interested in tutoring and mentoring. With the goal of sharing resources and information, people come from all over the region and throughout the country to attend workshops and speak on panels.

The most recent of these "Tutor/Mentor Leadership and Networking Conferences" occured at the end of last month, on Friday November 21 at the Field Museum. The event was attended by 95 people, all of whom were greated by blown-up poster-sized versions of some of the maps featured throughout this blog! (Thanks David!)

I was also honored to have a chance to present with Dan Bassill in a workshop called "Mapping Collaborative Strategies," where I had another chance to give a tour of our maps to a new audience, and explain how they are used. A lot like I did in this blog.

It was great actually meeting other tutor/mentor professionals, and having a chance to talk with a handful who approached me afterward to discuss possible collaborations in creating mapping solutions for their unique strategic tutoring/mentoring purposes. Of course, I am willing to assist others and share information, and look forward to any partnerships this project might generate in our combined struggle against poverty.

And of course, the conference gives me a new opportunity to make more maps!

As I did back for the May conference, I took attendee data, and created a few maps that show where attendees are working in relationship to eachother - a visual directory of attendees.

As always, clicking on these maps will bring up a larger, more detailed version in your browser.

This first map shows organizations and participants that travelled from outlying areas and from across state lines:

The second map zooms to the entire Chicagoland region and plots organizations and individuals who attended, against poverty data collected by the Census Bureau in 2000. This of course helps to show where, in relation to poverty, these local participants are working with kids:

Lastly, I zoomed to the downtown locations. (Unfortunately the near west side was not represented too strongly in attendance this fall.)

But in all, attendance was really strong for a one-day conference, and spending time hearing participants discuss important strategies pertaining to networking, volunteer recruitment, and fundraising was time well-spent for everyone.

For more information on the conference, please take a look at Dan's blog or Nicole's blog.