The Tutor/Mentor Connection (T/MC) seeks to build a community of adults and organizations that are dedicated to reaching youth living in poverty and to building a sophisticated, long-term support system that leads them to careers. The articles on this web site illustrate strategies and ideas that can be adopted by leaders to achieve this vision.
Follow these links to see how Tutor/Mentor Connection follows media stories with maps and strategies that anyone can use to turn the "bad new" into good news.
Dec. 18, 2009 - Health Gap Widens between Blacks and Whites
Many people say "It takes a Village to Raise a Child". This map shows how we think of "village".
Most don't think about the money and manpower it takes to enable each member of the village to do his/her job properly. Most funding of non profits is "random acts of kindness" or charitable giving that is restricted to a specific geography, based on where the donor is located, or a limited number of years, based on donor guidelines.
No business could succeed with such restrictions on revenue. For non profits working to help kids grow from pre-school to first job, a 20 year journey, such funding strategies actually work against the ultimate goal, of kids in careers.
The T/MC library has links to many articles that illustrate challenges and opportunities. We show how volunteer involvement in a tutor/mentor program is an important form of civic engagement. It expands the network of adults supporting youth development and education strategies.
T/MC also has done surveys with program leaders to understand their most important challenges. A discussion of challenges is hosted on the Tutor/Mentor Connection's Ning.com forum.
We encourage you to read and understand these, and build giving strategies that provide on-going and flexible funding to organizations working to help kids to careers.
The words tutoring and mentoring mean different things to different people, based on the social-economic status and age of the youth being served, and of the different goals being served. Some times our pictures and videos help people understand how a tutor/mentor program connects kids from high poverty areas with adults and learning experiences from beyond those neighborhoods.
The Tutor/Mentor Connection has created a vareity of short PDF essays, such as this one, titled Tutor/Mentor, Same Words, Different Meaning - defining the terms, to help leaders understand the different forms of tutoring and/or mentoring that exists.
When the Tutor/Mentor Connection was created in 1993 one of our goals was to "collect all that is known" about tutoring/mentoring and education-to-careers in a "library" of knowledgethat anyone can draw from at any time to help kids from a poverty neighborhood get the adult support they need to move to careers. As the Internet became available, this process began to collect ideas from all over the world.
This knowledge map, illustrates the different types of information being collected. It is intended to serve as a "blueprint" which anyone can draw from, or contribute to. While we will never map all of the knowledge, the ideas we do collect may reach a tipping point where the broader range of ideas leads to more comprehensive solutions applied in more places around the world to help kids move out of poverty and into jobs and careers.
Read more about the T/MC goals in the Vision and Mission sections
Understanding Issues and Benefits
Follow these links to see how Tutor/Mentor Connection
Many people say "It takes a Village to Raise a Child". This 
When the Tutor/Mentor Connection was created in 1993 one of our goals was to "collect all that is known" about tutoring/mentoring and education-to-careers in a "library" of knowledge that anyone can draw from at any time to help kids from a poverty neighborhood get the adult support they need to move to careers. As the Internet became available, this process began to collect ideas from all over the world.