May 2005 Tutor/Mentor Conference in Chicago

This map show total participation in the May 2005 Tutor/Mentor Leadership and Networking Conference held in Chicago. This is part of a series of maps being created to show the range of organizations that have participated in these events and to also illustrate the need for greater participation from business, philanthropy, faith groups, political leaders, media and others who would be part of the "village it takes to raise our children". This map shows only the programs who participated in the May 2005 conference. Due to a technical glitch, these don't all show on the above map. These are not all of the organizations providing volunteer-based tutoring and/or mentoring. It's not realistic to expect every program at every conference. However, by having continuous conferences since May 1994 we've been able to connect a larger percent of the tutoring/mentoring community to each other and to all of the other information shared in the Tutor/Mentor Connection library. This work has been done in the past, and in the present, with limited and inconsistent support from philanthropy, business, Chicago Public Schools or political leaders. The next conference will be held at the Metcalf Federal Building on Friday, June 7th and my hope is that these maps help motivate more leaders to provide their support for the work that Tutor/Mentor Connection and now Tutor/Mentor Institute, LLC have been doing for nearly 20 years.

November 2009 Tutor/Mentor Conference Map

This map shows participation in the November 2009 Tutor/Mentor Leadership and Networking Conference, held at Northwestern University. A keynote speaker at this conference was Valdis Krebs, a social network analysis expert from the Cleveland, Ohio area. He wrote this blog post showing how he had connected to Dan Bassill and the Tutor/Mentor Connection. If you read more of the articles Valdis has written about networks you can begin to see how the conferences are part of a network-building process launched by myself almost 40 years ago. See maps of additional past conferences here. Be part of the next conference. See details here.

Class Divide in Chicago - New Maps

This image is from an article in The Atlantic Monthly Place Matters story titled Class-Divided Cities: Chicago Edition Maps are used to show the different economic and intellectual divisions in Chicago. There is an interactive map in this article that enables you to zoom in. This map is similar to the interactive map on the Tutor/Mentor Program Locator that enables you to build your own map, adding layers of information showing where tutor/mentor programs are most needed, and also showing what tutor/mentor programs are operating in different parts of the city.

The Tutor/Mentor Interactive map was built in 2008-09 by a team in India using part of a $50,000 donation given in November 2007 to upgrade the mapping capacity at the Tutor/Mentor Connection. We ran out of money to keep building this or updating it in spring 2009 and in 2011 the non profit hosting this project dropped it completely due to lack of funding. I created the Tutor/Mentor Institute, LLC to find ways to keep it going. My team in India has disbanded and I don't have the money to bring them back, or find local talent to update the Program Locator. I'd like to find a way to connect with talent that created the map for this Atlantic Monthly article, or who could do such work. If we can update the Program Locator and add funds for marketing and teaching people to use it in Chicago, we should be able to find ways to share this with other cities without them having to build their entire system from a zero base. If you're interested in helping please introduce yourself on Facebook, Twitter, Linked in or on this Ning site.

November 1997 Tutor/Mentor Leadership Conference Map

Using MapAList I've been able to upload data from an Excel spreadsheet to show participation in the November 1997 Tutor/Mentor Leadership and Networking Conference. You can interact with the map, click on icons to see what organizations were participating, and from this information get a sense of how effective the Tutor/Mentor Connection was in bringing people from different parts of the Chicago region together for this event. Total attendance for this conference was 205. This was during the time when the Montgomery Ward Corporation provided office space and funding and Public Communications, Inc. was providing Public Relations support. We've not had that level of support since 2002, yet have continued to offer the conferences. This is same map, showing organization's offering various forms of tutoring, mentoring only. Visit this page to see a complete collection of conference maps.