GO CATS GO! (Let's make a Wildcat difference!)

I wrote this email recently and sent it out to my NU networks to show all the great work that Northwestern Alumni are doing to help kids around the city in hopes that some folks will decide to help us out this holiday season. Can you take a few minutes to send a similar note around to your friends, family or colleagues to let them know about why you care about helping at-risk kids through tutoring/mentoring? OR if you happen to be a Northwestern alum like me, go ahead and copy my message verbatim if you'd like and send it around. You'll be surprised how many people will listen.

Happy Holidays!

Chris
_________________________________________________

Hello Wildcat!
My name is Christopher Warren and I'm a recent Northwestern grad--class of 2008. Being the world-class institution it is, NU has a lot to be proud of: a tradition of academic excellence, top-notch faculty, 3 beautiful campuses, an undefeated basketball team and a bowl-bound football squad to boot! GO CATS! However, what I'm most proud of is the difference it's young alumni are making in the lives of young people right here in Chicago.

Cabrini Connections, The Tutor/Mentor Connection is a Chicago nonprofit organization that connects at-risk youth growing up in poverty with networks of caring adults that are committed to their success. They are a particularly effective organization due to their unique global/local strategy, which operates a single, model program in the Cabrini-Green neighborhood while strategically supporting the growth and operation of similar programs throughout the city, from the far south-side all the way up to Evanston. Despite recent challenges presented by the economy they have a proven record of success over the past 18 years, which owes much to the consistent support of generous individuals in the Northwestern University community like yourself. In fact, a whopping 3/4 of their full-time staff is comprised of Northwestern alumni, who recently brought a group of promising high-school students from Cabrini-Green to visit our campus!

The strength of our Northwestern education and the networks of people that we've met there have put us on the path to success. As a student leader at Northwestern and beyond, you are in an enviable position, surrounded by people and resources that kids growing up in the isolation of urban poverty can only dream of. Can you join me this holiday season in sharing some of that with a donation to help us continue building networks of support for inner-city kids? If you cannot give now, please consider forwarding this email along to 5 people in your NU network so that together we can continue to make a positive Wildcat impact on lives all around the city.

Happy holidays and GO CATS!

Chris Warren

Former Northwestern University Public Interest Program Fellowand Cabrini Connections, Tutor/Mentor Connection Volunteer

25 of our students on a Campus

Visit at NU this past October

Former NU running back

and all-star Cabrini Connections

supporter Tyrell Sutton

Recent Northwestern graduate and Video Club

Coordinator Shu Ling Yong teaches digital

film editing techniques to our students

Mapping Northwestern University for Tutoring/Mentoring Programs

So as I've mentioned in previous posts, Colleges and Universities are full of valuable assets for Tutor/Mentor Programs like ours. They are chock full of smart and engaged people who want to make a difference. However, for better or for worse, universities are multifaceted communities, with a wide variety of buildings, departments, offices...etc. They also have an unfortunate tendency to be composed of various organizational silos that inhibit communication between different parts of the university. In fact many a program coordinator has been frustrated by the seemingly endless amounts of emails and phone calls necessary to reach the right administrator who can actually begin to help forge a mutually beneficial relationship.

Therefore, after facilitating a workshop about ways to constructively engage Northwestern University at our May Conference, I decided it would be beneficial to put together a concept map of all of the different parts of NU that could help a tutor/mentor program like ours. From the various service learning, work-study, internship and practicum opportunities available for non-profits to secure skilled and committed volunteers to the various philanthropic wings of the university, consider this map a guide to the assets of Northwestern University. Don't forget to click through to the links embedded on each item to find out more. The JPEG above is just a static graphic, click here to access the map complete with all its links. Hope you like it and pass it on to people and organizations you think it could benefit.

According to our tutor/mentor program locator there are 8 programs currently operating in the 60201 area code and about 10 more close by in Rogers Park. Programs like these could greatly benefit from knowing what parts of the university to build relatoinships with, I know Cabrini Connections certainly can, and is benefiting from our connection to Northwestern. Anyway, stay tuned for more useful concept maps in the near future!

Find the map at: www.tinyurl.com/northwesternmap

Engaging Universities Workshop

So fresh off the heels of our 31st Tutor/Mentor Conference, which we hosted on May 27th and 28th, I feel invigorated. I attended the November Tutor/Mentor Conference but was able to take a more proactive role at this conference due to the fact I already had one under my belt, and was more familiar with the organizational aims of the conference. One highlight was having the opportunity to present my own workshop about Engaging University Communities to help non-profit tutor/mentor programs find many of the resources that they need to sustain and grow themselves.

To help me I brought in a number of friends and colleagues to share their perspectives. First was Molly Day, co-founder and executive director of CampusCATALYST, an organization that engages college and business school students in high-impact, pro-bono consulting projects with local nonprofits. She graduated from NU last year and is currently a PIP fellow. We're actually working currently with a team of campusCATALYST students who are helping us to monetize our static and interactive GIS mapping capacity, found on www.tutormentorprogramlocator.net.

Another friend and PIP fellow who joined us was Ryan Pederson, who currently serves as the Campus Director for the Center for Global Engagement (CGE) at Northwestern University. He graduated from Northwestern University last year where he was heavily involved with the campus chapter of InterVarsity Christian Fellowship. He discussed some ways that programs can effectively engage faith communities on campus as well as shared some insights he gleaned from working with student leaders through the Center for Global Engagement. He also spoke to the advantages and disadvantages of engaging Greek communities on campus.

We were also lucky enough to be joined by Sue Sowle, who coordinates Project SOAR, a remarkable mentoring program at the McGaw YMCA in Evanston. At McGaw, NU students play integral roles in nearly every aspect of their youth programming, particularly their mentoring program, which is comprised of both paid and volunteer staff recruited from NU via work-study positions that are paid by the university. This provides the YMCA with a reliable source of motivated, intelligent and passionate students who can mentor area youth. Sue spoke about the benefits of their relationship with NU as well as details about how exactly she went about setting it up.

Finally, future Cabrini Connections fellow Bradley Troast and co-chair of the Northwestern Community Development Corps joined us to share his successes with engaging students as volunteers at dozens of non-profit sites around Evanston and Chicago. As a current NU Senior who has headed up a major student-led community service organization he lent a very interesting perspective to the workshop.

As facilitator, I also shared my thoughts about how Cabrini Connections has benefited from intentionally engaging university communties, particulaly Northwestern as half of our full time staff are NU alumni. Through making a point to reach out to the NU community via our ning group: http://nututormentor.ning.com/ and personal networks, we have been able to host our spring Tutor/Mentor Conference at the NU school of law downtown and will be hosting our upcoming November conference at the NU Evanston campus. We've benefited from having a full-time intern in Diana Castaneda via her SESP practicum and a part-time intern Jessica Rockswold who is currently analyzing our students grade cards in order to quantify the impact that our program has had on our students' grades. Besides NU, our Media Outreach intern Meagan Hermanowicz from DePaul has played an essential role in our Public Relations and helping to draw resources to our organization and our steady flow of interns from IIT are constantly helping us to improve our online T/MC content.

All in all, I think this 90 min workshop offered a plethora of resources to its attendees and should be repeated in the coming years. In our struggle to stay afloat in this economy, it's important for tutor/mentor programs like ours to reach out to University communities who often have the human, financial and organizational resources that we need to maximize our impact. Hopefully future workshops can continue to make this case in new ways and taking into account emerging university institutions that hold promise for non-profits such as the Northwestern University Center for Civic Engagment.

Perhaps you'd be interested in sharing your own knowledge/experiences in engaging universities like Northwestern?

campusCATALYST @ cabriniCONNECTIONS

Earlier this week Dan and I met with Liz Weber, a co-coordinator of campusCATALYST, which is a relatively new organization at Northwestern that gives undergraduates a chance to work with Kellogg MBA students, taking on a consulting role for local non-profits. Cabrini Connections, The Tutor/Mentor Connection was selected as one of the 5 organizations that they will be consulting with during this upcoming Spring quarter. Therefore, we met in order to determine an area of need that a team of 5 undergraduates and 1 Kellogg MBA could tackle in the coming months. Dan and I decided that this would be a good opportunity to try to expand our "Business School Connection" model, which sees business schools as resource-rich potential partners that should have a vested interest in working with youth tutor/mentor organizations around the city.

We are hoping that this partnership could be loosely modeled after our Lawyers Lend a Hand Program, which brings together lawyers of all stripes from the Chicago Bar Association who are interested in using their networks and resources to "lend a hand" to at-risk kids throughout the city in the form of renewable grants to Chicago Tutor/Mentor Programs. Last year the "Lend A Hand" program distributed over $200,000 in grants to 27 different tutor/mentor programs to be used for general operating funds, the most difficult yet useful type of funding for programs like ours to receive.

With this project, we’re aiming to use campusCATALYST's talents and relationships with the Kellogg school of Business to increase their engagement with tutoring/mentoring programs across the city, including our own. The skills and expertise that business schools impart on their students and alumni are exactly the kinds of skills that tutor/mentor programs need to increase their effectiveness and impact on the kids they serve. For example, in conceptualizing the relative lack of tutor/mentor programs compared to the number of at-risk kids who need them, it is helpful to think of it as a marketing and distribution problem. We’re selling hope and opportunity delivered by adult tutors and mentors. For kids, volunteers and business partners to respond, we must have a good product, we must offer effective services and we must have as many distribution points as possible so our services are easy to access, we must have great people and we must sell, sell, sell!

We feel that business must be more responsible for youth entering the workforce. They cannot depend on public schools or the government to create a system that will be competitive with education to careers programs in other countries. We believe that in today’s climate of increasing corporate social responsibility, high profile business schools, such as Kellogg School of Management, have an opportunity to take the lead in encouraging and supporting business involvement in the process of pulling at-risk kids towards college and careers. The Tutor/Mentor Connection has already met with faculty and leaders of a number of Chicago business schools with a goal of enlisting faculty at one school to become a partner with the Tutor/Mentor Connection the way the Chicago Bar Association has become a partner through our “Lawyers Lend a Hand” initiative and in the way that www.verizonreads.org supports literacy programs throughout the country. These organizations believe in the effectiveness of tutor/mentor programs in bringing about a wide variety of positive youth outcomes including but not limited to: improved grades and self-esteem, improved H.S. graduation and college matriculation rates, reduced likeliness of teen pregnancy, initiation of drug and alcohol use and improved school attendance.

The partnership we are seeking is significantly different from traditional philanthropy, which often initiates a project and then asks the organization to seek other sources to keep it going. We are aiming to create a sustainable partnership where Kellogg and other business schools take a leadership role in channeling resources to tutor/mentor programs around the city, helping to pull disadvantaged kids to success, to careers and towards making a positive contribution to society.

Once this resource stream is established, we want to develop a competition between business schools around the city and country to put together teams of students and alumni to fight to raise the most funds and/or bring much needed resources to the many under-funded tutor/mentor programs in each city. Since tutor/mentor programs offer a unique solution to some of the most hot-button social issues of our time: poverty, educational inequity, corporate social responsibility…etc, this provides business schools a great opportunity to use their resources to make a big impact on at-risk youth while at the same time, building positive PR for their schools and developing tomorrows workforce.

Interested in this idea? email me at chris.warrens.mail(at)gmail.com and we can discuss some different ways to get involved

Volunteer Spotlight: Zak Kustok

Former Big Ten Quarterback Zak Kustok graduated from Northwestern University as the second most prolific passer in school history. A star both on and off the field, Kustok’s talent and leadership led his team to a share of the 2000 Big Ten title while acing his economics coursework at the same time. After spending brief stints with the Green Bay Packers, Miami Dolphins and our very own Chicago Bears from 2002 to 2004, Zak eventually decided to put his economics degree to use, landing a job at the Chicago Board of Trade as a Sales Trader in 2003. He quickly made a name for himself and was asked only 2 years later to start a Chicago chapter of the Bavaro group, which he helped lead until they were bought out last year. He is currently working as an account manager with Stryker Medical.

Zak is a brand new volunteer here at Cabrini Connections; he started the last week of October on a recommendation from his friend and former teammate at NU, Cabrini Connections Administrative Coordinator, EL Da’Sheon. He was paired up with fellow football player, Lincoln Park High School Junior Raheem Muhammad. Raheem was in the program in the past but left after his tutor took a job in another city. He’s back now and looking to Zak for guidance and support as he looks to stay on track during his Junior and Senior years. Zak is glad to be paired up with a student who is so driven to learn and succeed! Zak, learning from his collegiate experience working with youth through the D.A.R.E. outreach program, is excited to “keep Raheem on the right path,” sharing his experience as a Big Ten football player and offering advice to another promising young football player. However, Zak is not one to push his past onto his student, he’s made it clear that Raheem is in the driver’s seat and will offer his unconditional support whether Raheem chooses to pursue football, construction or the culinary arts upon graduation.

We’re so glad to have young, talented mentors like Zak here at Cabrini Connections, mentors who can bond with their students through shared life experience and also a genuine desire to connect and build a solid foundation for a long-term relationship of mutual support. Thanks Zak!

Knowing the research

Welcome back faithful readers (all 131 of you according to google analytics)! Since the first research project I conducted at Northwestern University, a meta-analysis entitled: "Training Spatial Skills: What Works, for Whom and for How Long?" was just recently submitted to Psychological Bulletin for publication (woo hoo!), I thought this would be a good time to share findings from some recent tutoring/mentoring research and discuss how they can help us in our quest to promote effective tutoring/mentoring here at Cabrini Connections and elsewhere.

As tutoring/mentoring programs such as ours and Big Brothers/Big Sisters become more and more widespread, there has been an increasing amount of research both evaluating individual programs, as well as synthesizing previous work, such as by using the same meta-analytic methods we employed in the aforementioned paper.

By the way, for the uninitiated, a meta-analysis essentially involves collecting data from a number of previous studies that all were investigating a related hypothesis and then analyzing that data to draw further inferences. For example, in our study, we wanted to know what types of trainings could improve children and adults' spatial abilities and for how long. So we collected hundreds of studies that looked at the effectiveness of particular types of training and then analyzed them all together in order to determine if they indeed can be improved with training and, if so, what the best ways to improve them are.

One of the most significant studies pertaining to tutoring/mentoring was published in 2000 and looked at just under 1000 youth who participated in Big Brothers/Big Sisters (BB/BS) programs around the country (1). Like any good experiment, it had a control group, roughly 500 kids who applied for a mentor at BB/BS but were not placed with one, that was compared with an experimental group, the other 500 kids who WERE placed with a mentor. This study found that kids who were paired up with a mentor at BB/BS:

-- were 46% less likely to initiate drug use

-- were 26% less likely to initiate alcohol use (that number reaches 50 percent for the girls in the programs)

-- were 33% less likely to hit someone

--Skipped half as many days of school

--Reported improved parent and peer relationships (this was especially true among boys)

Above all else, these results demonstrated conclusively that MENTORING WORKS and are cited by organizations such as ours to argue for the effectiveness of our programming and why it is necessary for the kids we serve. By showing the effectiveness of mentoring in a well-thought out, controlled and published experiment, this study laid the groundwork for future investigations into the effectiveness of particular types of tutoring/mentoring and specific programmatic content.

One of these such studies that analyzed different mentoring methods with the intent to determine the most effective practices, was a meta-analysis published in 2002. This study looked at 55 different studies with 575 effect sizes (quantifiable changes in the youth served). The general finding was that, when taken as a whole, mentoring programs do provide a positive impact on youth, but not as large as might have been expected. As might be expected, this news was a bit unsettling for many people in the mentoring community, since this wasn't an analysis of one particular mentoring program, but rather 55 programs, utilizing many different techniques, and it didn't report the huge positive impacts found in the aforementioned study and others.

However, the real benefit of this study is in the so-called "moderators of impact". These are the personal traits of the mentors and mentees, structures of the particular programs and the characteristics of the mentor-mentee relationships. When these "moderators" are examined, a much sunnier picture of youth mentoring is revealed. For example:

--The programs in the study that provided ongoing training for mentors, offered matches structured activities, set firm requirements around frequency of mentor-mentee contact,
offered mentor support services, or found ways to increase parent involvement showed
a greater impact. All these factors were strong predictors of higher outcomes for youth.

--The programs where youth felt most positive about their relationships also had the best outcomes.

--The impact of mentoring seemed to be greatest for youth who were most at-risk. Here is evidence that mentoring helps those who need it most. (i.e. youth living in extreme poverty such as that found in Cabrini Green and other housing projects all around Chicago).

Thus, this study really is a strong argument for the value of program quality. Simply signing a child up for a tutor/mentor program and sticking them in a room with an adult without careful consideration of the program structure is not going to lead to the most ideal outcomes for the youth (or the volunteer). Exhibit A: Ricky Hendon's $20,000 tutor grant scandal that broke last month. http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-afterschooljul20,0,6218298.story and http://nicolecabrini.blogspot.com/2008/07/answering-20000-question.html

Therefore, to ensure the best outcomes, programs such as ours need to take advantage of this research and offer useful training for our volunteers, create an environment and program structure that fosters the formation of strong mentor-mentee relationships and increase parent involvement, all things we are working hard to address here at Cabrini Connections. For example, I just finished creating the student and volunteer orientation packets that were carefully designed to help volunteers not only maximize their impact at the beginning of the school year, as they meet with their mentee, but also to help give them ideas and tools to strengthen the mentor-mentee bond. Additionally, this year we are organizing our first ever Welcome Back Brunch, which will give mentors an additional opportunity to meet their youth mentee's parents before the school-year starts and engage with them in a friendly and comfortable atmosphere so they can begin to work together to maximize their child's potential!

As you can see just from this brief post about a pair of mentoring studies, being familiar with the relevant research can greatly assist an organization such as ours to offer the best possible mentoring programming for our youth. Therefore I think it is especially important as someone who has gained a familiarity with the way this work is done and reported, to summarize and share this knowledge with people and organizations who can benefit.

Anyway, with this in mind, I'm thinking about doing a regular feature in my blog about the importance of "Knowing the Research". Any thoughts? I'd love some feedback on whether people would find this sort of thing interesting. Also, I can try to make the writing even less technical if I'm losing people with jargon. I've never done this before, so any constructive criticism would be much appreciated!

Chau!

(1)Tierney, J.P., Grossman, J.B., and Resch, N.L. (2000). Making a Difference: An Impact Study of Big Brothers/Big Sisters. Public/Private Ventures

2)DuBois, D.L., Holloway, B.E., Valentine, J.C., and Cooper, H. (2002). Effectiveness of Mentoring Programs for Youth: A Meta-Analytic Review. American Journal of Community Psychology, Vol. 30, No. 2.

The role of Northwestern University

So my boss, Dan Bassill, just wrote a piece in his blog (which can be found here: http://tutormentor.blogspot.com/2008/07/role-of-engaged-universities.html) about the role that engaged universities should play in their surrounding communities, so I thought I would opine about how this relates to Northwestern University in particular. As anyone who has spent a significant amount of time in Evanston can attest, town-gown relations have been strained for quite some time. This stems from, among other things, the fact that NU, as it predates the founding of the city of Evanston, is exempt from paying property taxes. Its continuing expansion into Evanston's tax base through the recent purchase of office buildings like 1800 Sherman Ave has also exacerbated things. Anyway, there is a clear sentiment among Evanston residents, particularly those living in less affluent areas of South and West Evanston, that Northwestern does not do enough to give back to the local community. This is particularly visible when the many multi-million dolllar construction projects in and immediately around the university are compared with the fact that in central west evanston, the percentage of residents living below the poverty line approaches 20%. A quick search on the tutormentorprogram locator found that there are 8 different tutor/mentor programs serving the youth of this area, however, like nearly all tutor/mentor programs, these tend to lack valuable resources such as, space, funding and volunteers. Imagine what would happen if NU decided to support tutor/mentor programs in Evanston by encouraging its nearly 3000 faculty and 15,000 students to engage with and inspire local youth through preexisting tutor/mentor programs. Or if alumni, instead of donating tens of millions of dollars at a time to strictly fund research and construction projects, they allocated a few $40,000 to $80,000 grants as well to tutor/mentor programs in order to empower the local community, one at-risk youth at a time.

In investing in area youth, Northwestern stands not only to improve town-gown relations, but to benefit in other, tangible ways as well. For instance, research has shown that students who are not positively engaged by adults and other role models such as those they find in a dedicated tutor/mentor program, are more likely to affiliate with gangs and other criminal elements that pose a threat to safety at the university. In fact, last year my roommate Alex was attacked in a gang initiation right outside of the movie theater and Chili's in Evanston, a popular student hangout merely one block from university property. He was knocked unconscious, kicked and beaten in the middle of the street by a group of teenagers until a woman dining at Chili's intervened. He learned in the court proceedings that followed that he was not the first student to be beaten within inches of his life in similar gang-initiations specifically targeting NU students. Therefore, Northwestern has a direct stake in the positive engagement of Evanston youth, not only for their well-being, but for the safety and security of their own student body.

During my tenure here at Cabrini Connections, I will try to form partnerships with student organizations such as the Northwestern Community Development Corps and the African American Student association FMO to get the Northwestern University community more engaged in combating poverty and injustice through active support and engagement with at-risk youth via tutor/mentor programs. I just started a social network called NU tutor/mentor connection which i will be constantly updating to serve as a hub and forum for the Northwestern University community to get involved with tutor/mentor programs both in Evanston and around Chicago. You can find it at nututormentor.ning.com Please join us!

hasta la victoria...siempre