Availability of tutors in high poverty zip codes of Chicago

I've been creating maps to show where volunteer-based tutor/mentor programs are most needed in Chicago and other cities, based on poverty levels, poorly performing schools, violence and other indicators. Scroll through this blog to see articles using such maps. View this PDF to see a set of maps showing the number of youth, age 6-17, who are in households below the poverty level, in each Chicago community area.

Most of my maps include Chicago tutor/mentor program location information from a Directory of volunteer-based tutoring and/or mentoring programs operating in high poverty areas of Chicago, which I've been maintaining since 1994. See my list.

I focus on volunteer-based, and normally free, tutoring, mentoring services, realizing that parents in these areas don't have the income to support paid tutors, and that paid tutors, because of the cost, could not remain part of a young person's life for more than a few weeks or months, not for multiple years.

Thus, I've not focused extensively on the availability of for-profit tutors (who charge an hourly fee). This weekend I was introduced to a web site that is trying to collect this information. After some email conversations the site's owner, a University of Chicago graduate, created a map showing the number of tutors in his database, for each zip code in Chicago. The site includes a search feature that enables you to search by zip code, to get contact information for tutors who focus on that zip code. Furthermore, it shows the average cost per hour charged by tutors in different zip codes.

The site is named "Find Tutors Near Me" and you can find information about Chicago at this link.