OHATS Tutor/Mentor Connection (TMC) website was originally built in 2000 by a PhD student from the University of Kansas, then rebuilt in 2007 by a team of volunteers from India. The new version was used until 2015 when the site began to not work properly. It has been off line since 2018. 

OHATS is an Internet-based system for organizations to easily record and report important events, actions and lessons that take place during the day-to-day work to improve the conditions necessary for all youth to succeed. The T/MC used the information from OHATS to quantify and summarize key accomplishments and lessons. More than seventeen-hundred accomplishments, lessons, and activities were reported by T/MC staff between September 2000 and November 2013. 

The original version of OHATS is available on the Internet Archive (see link below).  At t he left, and in this blog article, you can see an archived version of the original OHATS, built in 2000.  You can not only read the description, you can also open links to one page that shows the data-entry form and the type of information we were collecting, and to another page that shows actions that had been documented.  This video reviews information in this 2002 PDF. See discussion of sections of OHATS on the T/MC Ning forum

Using this 2001 archive, and the descriptions of the news site that are in this section of this website, anyone could create their own version of a OHATS.

View the archived version of the 2007 OHATS.

Since late 2011 articles on the Stanford Social  Innovation Review have focused on "collective impact" or the result of organizations in a community working together to achieve a shared vision.  One of the key strategies of Collective Impact is the use of shared measurement tools and a "backbone organization" that provides leadership to the network.  We've been doing this for much longer.

OHATS for Tutor/Mentor Connection (T/MC) was introduced to the T/MC in 2000 by Dr. Stergios Roussos, a graduate of the University of Kansas.  This June 2000 PDF shows what an OHATS can do for organizations.  The T/MC OHATS was built by Dr. Roussos, using a small grant from the Lloyd Fry Foundation.  T/MC produced this report in 2002 to summarize actions documented from 1999-2002, and to request support for further development.

The first version of OHATS was rebuilt in 2007 by a team from India, based on the PDF report that Dr. Roussos published in 2002.  It was used through 2013, with more than 1000 actions documented showing work done to achieve the four part strategy goals of the organization.

The 2007 version of OHATS included interactive graphics like the one shown at the left. Every time a recorder documented an action the pie chart in the Metric's pages changed.  Click the button below to visit the T/MC OHATS site and learn more about this system, and the actions of the Tutor/Mentor Connection.  

Visit the archived version of the T/MC OHATS site

NOTE:  In 2015 OHATS site stopped functioning correctly due to MySQL error. Later, the graphics created using Adobe, also stopped working. The site is now only available as an archive.

The T/MC operated as a non profit organization and depended on charity donations and in-kind support to build and keep OHATS free and widely accessible. Since 2011 T/MC has been supported by Tutor/Mentor Institute, LLC.  Dan Bassill, founder of the T/MC and T/MI is now 78 and instead of rebuilding the T/MC and OHATS under his lead he seeks investors, partners, volunteers and interns build new versions of OHATS, based on T/MC archives, and use them to support youth program growth in all cities, not just Chicago.  Contact Dan if you'd like to take this role.

OHATS can be used to fulfill one or multiple purpose.  Some of these are described here.

History & Knowledge Database:

Social welfare and grassroots efforts often lack resources (time, money, skills) and stable staffing to create habits and use tools to regularly examine what they do in a way that leads to useful discovery and program improvement. In most community organizations intelligence and wisdom stay and die with individuals and organizations. This hurts not only individual organizations and their stakeholders, but also entire community efforts that are sustained through collaboration and exchange. The absence of useful tools to track and reflect on progress leads many community organizations and initiatives to repeat preventable problems, struggle to identify their needs, lessons and best practices, and to share them with peers, and be unable to demonstrate neither daily impact, nor cumulative impact over years of service. These problems weaken all community work, and contribute to the extinction of organizations and community improvement initiatives.

OHATS (Organizational History and Tracking System) is an organized and systematic way for a group, program or network of community organizations to record, observe, analyze and report contributions and key events that influence progress toward its mission and goals. For example, one can use OHATS to track accomplishments and results, organizational procedures, lessons and best practices, critical external events that influence the work, and service delivery details and statistics.  NOTE: As of 10-23-15 OHATS site is not functioning due to MySQL error. Volunteers needed to fix problem.

The idea behind OHATS is simple and proven throughout history: if a community group tracks actions, events, lessons and results important to their success then they can learn from them and be more successful.  View OHATs archive at this link. View 2001 version at this link.