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

TWITTER

So, in case you haven't heard, Cabrini Connections, The Tutor/Mentor Connection have hopped aboard the TWITTER bandwagon and are now tweeting updates and links with the best of them. We're hoping to use this resource to keep people abreast of our activities and potential supporters in the loop with constant updates. With the ability for people to follow our activities and subscribe to our feeds, TWITTER is another way to direct traffic to relevant content on our blogs and websites (such as this blog). So, stay connected to us wherever you are with TWITTER by following us at: tutormentorteam

Fundraising: Cause Marketing Part 2

So, as promised, here's round 2 of my fundraising series. In this post I want to talk about one way in which we're starting to utilize cause marketing concepts and professionals to benefit our organization. I want to start with the person who introduced me to the term "cause marketing" in the first place, Alla Ioffe, recent DePaul University graduate and founder of the socially conscious Chicago-based events company Pallandrome. We connected through Meagan, our Media Outreach intern who recommended that I chat with Alla about getting Cabrini Connections onboard a potential fundraising event, which has now materialized into a Sunday Funday Party that will take place on Sunday, Sept 20th from 11am to 2pm.

The event, which is completely organized by Alla's firm, will take place at the Windy City Fieldhouse (2367 W Logan Blvd) and will bring together approximately 500 children and their parents for a day of fun, games, snacks and marketing opportunities for companies looking to showcase their back-to-school related goods and services in front of affluent parents and their kids. Like past events, such as her Just Be Cause green business showcase, which took place at the Funky Buddah Lounge not too long ago, her fundraising model is ingenious. She comes up with an idea of an event that will be attractive enough to people to pay to attend and then charges sponsors for tables at the event so that they can promote their products in front of this large, engaged pool of potential customers. Then she donates a chunk of the proceeds to a good cause, like Cabrini Connections.

So at this upcoming event, young families will be lured by the prospect of relay races, food, bounce houses, games and prizes and will pay to come to the Windy City Field House. At the same time, sponsors eager to market their products to parents whose children are running, bouncing, eating, playing...etc will pay for tables in the Field House, providing an additional income stream, plus some added draw for the parents since there will be informative presentations about how to pack healthy lunches, sustainable living, how to encourage kids to live healthily...etc. Plus we, as the showcase organization, will have an opportunity to tell our story and connect with all the attendees, not just the affluent parents who might support our cause, but the socially conscious businesses who may be interested in partnering with us to provide volunteers, publicity, dollars or other types of support.

Therefore Alla, as a cause-based marketer/events planner, serves as the lliason between our non-profit, and the corporate world, connecting us in a mutually beneficial way that provides us with both dollars and positive public relations opportunties while providing the same for the sponsoring organizations, who pay for the opportunity. Since in this current economic climate many nonprofits like ours are trying to sustain our programming with contracting donor bases, dwindling foundation funding and cutbacks in government grants, we should be looking out for opportunities like these to provide much needed general operating funds. For this reason it's particularly important to understand the growing trend of cause marketing which is not only supplementing traditional corporate philanthropy but in increasing cases, replacing it. Stay tuned for part 3.

Forces For Good: Building and Nurturing Nonprofit Networks

Tutor/Mentor Connection Founder and CEO Dan Bassill (aka my boss) recently shared some interesting research findings in his blog:

About a decade ago, researchers from The University of Chicago's Chapin Hall Center for Children analyzed the Tutor/Mentor Connection and concluded:

"The Tutor/Mentor Connection may be particularly difficult to understand because it does not easily fit within known categories of organizations. It provides some of the supports that a membership organization or association would -- such as its newsletter, conference, and public relations efforts-- but it doesn't charge a membership fee or offer a membership identity. It also provides some of the matching services that volunteer associations provide and some of the technical assistance provided by organizations that do training and management consulting but without the fee sometimes charged by such consultants. Moreover, T/MC's citywide mission to not only support programs, but to increase their numbers, sets it apart from other types of programs."

Having recently read Forces For Good: The Six Practices of High-Impact Nonprofits, I noticed that the 4th practice that they identify as being essential for non-profits to achieve "extraordinary impact" is that they "build and nurture nonprofit networks, treating other groups as allies". The organizations that the authors determined to be "high-impact" non-profits through their research, organizations such as Youthbuild USA, The Heritage Foundation, The Exploratorium and Teach for America, were found to have a "network mind-set", rather than the more common "organization orientation". In other words, successful organizations in the social sector collaborate rather than compete with their peers. They see other organizations as allies rather than competition for scarce resources and that only through working collaboratively can they achieve maximum impact. The authors identified the following 4 common practices of "high impact" nonprofits, which I think can be identified in our own organization, The Tutor/Mentor Connection as well. Though it may be a bit presumptuous to say so, I do feel that some of the difficulty that people have in adequately understanding The Tutor/Mentor Connection stems from the fact that we do operate differently from most other non-profits, but this is a good thing, something that distinguishes us from other non-profits because of the systemic impact we are trying to achieve. So here are the 4 tactics that high-impact nonprofits utilize to maximize their impact through their networks, according to "Forces for Good".

-Growing the pie: Successful organizations focus on channeling valuable resources to fellow organizations and expanding resources for all programs rather than hording them just to grow their own organization. They want to grow resources for all programs because it increases their overall impact. We have done this through our role in developing the Lawyers Lend a Hand program which funds dozens of programs around the city.

-Share Knowledge: High-Impact nonprofits "actively share their knowledge and expertise with other organizations". We do this through our biannual conferences and our numerous websites, most importantly www.tutormentorexchange.net and www.tutormentorconnection.org We also make ourselves available, as the Chapin Hall researchers mentioned, for technical assistance and managerial consulting work.

-Develop Leadership: "These organizations develop leadership for the larger network, field, or movement, nurturing talented employees and developing the next generation of leadership. They magnify their impact indirectly, increasing both the personnel capacity of other organizations and their own social connections within their network." I think that the PIP fellowship clearly falls within this category. My supervisors Dan Bassill, EL Da'Sheon Nix and Nicole White have done much to develop my skills, knowledge and capacity to serve as a leader and advocate for youth tutoring/mentoring wherever my career might take me. This investment in a fellow like myself who will only stay with the organization for a year is clearly a forward-thinking investment in me as a lifelong potential change-agent, and not simply as an employee of The Tutor/Mentor Connection. In addition, The T/MC is constantly publishing material on our websites, sharing leadership strategies online and at our biannual conferences.

-Work in Coalitions: "Once these groups have built formal or informal networks, they go beyond their inner circle to form larger coalitions and mobilize their network for collective aims. They work in coalition with others, playing both lead and secondary roles, and they share the credit for their successes." This tendency to build coalitions is a definite character trait of Tutor/Mentor Connection Founder Dan Bassill and the organization as a whole. In my experience with our organization, everything from our conference planning, to volunteer recruitment to training volunteer tutors is seen as an opportunity for massive collaboration between every tutor/mentor program in the city, not just something for us to do well on our own.

As you can see, The Tutor/Mentor Connection does indeed have a network orientation as an organization and this is a good thing, despite the fact that it makes our organization a bit more difficult to explain to your average joe on the street/potential funder. For more info about our ideas about collaboration check out www.tutormentorexchange.net and here in particular. Also, check out these past blog posts that relate to the idea of collaboration

-Organizational Silos and effective collaboration

-Collaboration between Tutor/Mentor Programs

Social Networking for Nonprofits 101

In the past I've posted about the importance of social networks in youth development and explained what we do at Cabrini Connections in terms of bridging social capital. Today I want to discuss another very important aspect of social networks, how to utilize them to bring much needed resources to non-profits like Cabrini Connections. As I've said in previous posts, we all have social networks, whether we like it or not. We have people in our lives who care about us and what we do, as a result of the personal relationships we maintain, the groups we choose to affiliate ourselves with or merely by the virtue of us having met them in the past.

As someone who helps coordinate a volunteer-based non-profit, I am constantly working through my social networks to channel resources to our organization. In fact, I'm coming to understand that access to a large, resource-rich personal network is incredibly beneficial to non-profits like Cabrini Connections, whose business model depends on engaging individuals and encouraging them to support us with their time, talents and funds. Beyond the folks I know personally however, lies an even more vast, comparatively untapped network of resource-rich potential supporters. These are the people in my friends networks whom I don't know personally, but am connected to via this mutual friend. Social capital and networking theory state that due to the fact that we share a mutual friend, we are more subject to reciprocity norms that would lead us to support each other to a greater degree than we would if we weren't connected via a mutual friend. When utilized systematically and intentionally, these reciprocity norms can be utilized to the benefit of an organization to draw a variety of resources to them.
For example, I have been working with the Youth Leadership Council to determine a constructive capstone project for them to engage in that will build their leadership skills and self-esteem while also accomplishing an organizational objective of Cabrini Connections. After some discussion, the students decided that it would be good to film a short documentary about the long history of our program. Once that was decided, the next step was for me to find volunteers to assist the 6 students with completing their project.

Not knowing anybody in my immediate network who would have either the time or the skills to volunteer for this task, I thought about the people in my network who might know someone who would be willing to take on this project. So, I ended up reaching out to a woman, Rebecca Parrish, whom I met at the Cabrini Connections Art and Film Festival through her prior involvement with youth filmmakers. Therefore I asked her if anyone in her network might be interested in such a project. She immediately connected me with her friend Matt, who based on nothing except our mutual relationship with Rebecca, trusted me enough to volunteer his skills, time and eqipment to help our youth leadership council film this documentary in time to premiere it at the June 4th Year end Dinner. Check out the above graphic to see a visual representation of how this process played out.

Stories like this unfold every day at Cabrini Connections and effective organizations around the globe as we intentionally utilize our social networks to pull necessary resources towards our non-profits and the causes that we care so passionately about. That's why we try to turn everyone involved with our program, from our interns to our mentors, volunteers and students, into evangelists for our organization. The book "Forces for Good: The 6 Practices of High-Impact Nonprofits" argues that successful organizations "create ways for many people to engage with their organization...and convert them into evangelists who will spread the word among their social networks." Moreover, they argue that the very best non-profits "are particularly strategic about indentifying, converting and cultivating powerful individuals, or super-evangelists." They argue, as we do, that over time this process of identifying and intentionally engaging an ever growing community of potential supporters through social network analysis "can create a powerful community of individual supporters that is ever expanding."

Luckily, social networking tools such as facebook and LinkedIn make identifying and engaging these individuals as easy as typing their names into a search bar or perusing lists of individuals aligned with a given cause and finding mutual friends who can serve as a bridge to connect you. Therefore we encourage everyone interested in helping to pull at-risk youth off the streets and into college and careers to think critically about not only how they can support tutor/mentor programs addressing these issues, but how the people in their networks can help as well using their unique talents and resources.

Who's in your network?

When it comes down to getting jobs and career opportunities, it's all about who you know. We've heard it a million times. Regardless of work experience, schooling and commitment, when the job market is tough and there are lots of qualified applicants searching for fewer and fewer jobs, the personal connections you cultivate can often make a world of difference in determining your career options. Recognizing this, and the fact that kids growing up in high-poverty neighborhoods like Cabrini-Green don't often have networks of successful professionals willing to lend a hand to write a letter of recommendation, vouch as a personal reference, or introduce them to successful professionals in their chosen career track who can share valuable advice and experiences.

All too often, kids in high-poverty areas are surrounded by folks who, rather than pulling them towards college and careers, serve to push them into lives of crime, delinquency and squandered potential. Therefore, in our mentoring program, we bring volunteers, most of whom are successful professionals working in sectors such as law, finance, education...etc, together with at-risk kids, so that the kids can not only benefit from their relation with their mentor, but from their mentors' networks as well. For instance, if a student such as DeSean Hale is interested in becoming an architect, but his mentor isn't in the field, his mentor can reach into his own network and introduce DeSean to civil engineers, architects and draftsmen that he knows, giving DeSean access to valuable contacts and information that he wouldn't otherwise have.

So take a moment and think about your networks and what they could do to help a kid growing up in Cabrini-Green without such an extensive network of support and resources. A facebook app called Touchgraph photos can help you visualize your network as a series of nodes and find connections you never knew you had. Many people are also using programs like LinkedIn to map their own social networks or Muckety.com to trace the connections between newsmaking figures and the people and organizations that are in their networks.

For example, I've been trying to organize college visits to some regional colleges and universities. Clicking on a given college on my TouchGraph map shows me who I know that is affiliated with a given College, such as the University of Illinois. Therefore, I can easily identify friends who I can reach out to by email/phone/facebook msg to see if they would help me put together a visit. Since you can set touchgraph to sort your network by any number of different criteria, it is a powerful tool for visualizing your relations to other people you know.
Since social networking sites such as myspace and facebook are so popular, both among young professionals and the kids we serve at Cabrini Connections, it has never been easier to connect, online and in person, and be the bridge that these kids so desparately need to networks of greater power and influence.

Cabrini Connections can help you be that bridge!

Bridging Social Capital

Last week my boss Dan Bassill, Founder and CEO of Cabrini Connections, blogged about "bridging social capital" and how providing a means by which kids growing up in high-poverty neighborhoods can gain access to new social networks is perhaps the most important resource we can provide to our youth. You can find his post here. Indeed, at Cabrini Connections, what we do is to bring together successful working professionals with kids in economically disadvantaged communities and offer a structure for them to develop deep and lasting relationships, opening up the mentors networks, (personal, workplace, faith-based, community...etc) to their mentee (student) so that the youth can benefit from these contacts when seeking employment, internship experience, college admission and a career.

Harvard Political Scientist Robert Putnam has defined social capital as: "the collective value of all 'social networks' and the inclinations that arise from these networks to do things for each other". Considering the dearth of economic resources in isolated, high-poverty neighborhoods such as Cabrini Green, it can be argued that kids in our target population have less developed and supportive social networks than their counterparts in more affluent areas of Lincoln Park or the Gold Coast and that this contributes to their increased risk for negative outcomes such as: dropping out of high school, entering the prison system and teen pregnancy. In fact, a landmark study looking at over 24,000 public, Catholic and other private school students found that social capital in students' families and communities attributed to the much lower dropout rates in Catholic schools compared with the higher dropout rates found in public schools (Coleman and Hoffer 1987).

In a recent book, Bowling Alone (2000) Putnam posits that "Child development is powerfully shaped by social capital" and continued "presence of social capital has been linked to various positive outcomes, particularly in education". He argues that positive youth outcomes are primarily a result of a parent's social capital in their community. This crucially includes the relationships that they have with their childs' teachers and educators and more generally the strength of their relations with other individuals who determine their childs development both at school and in the community. However, in high-poverty communities where single mother-led households are the norm and numerous factors converge to requre these lone parents to work multiple jobs, leading to less time spent with children and their educators, it is difficult to accrue the high levels of social capital, that help catalyze a child's success.

This is where tutor/mentor programs like Cabrini Connections step in and help "bridge" this social capital. For instance, in our program mentors like last weeks' volunteer spotlight Carolyn Grunst work with both their students and their educators, meeting with school counselors, teachers and administrators to ensure that the child is receiving the resources they need at school while also developing trusting relationships with the child's primary caregivers. Mentors thus serve as bridges between often disparate communities, between school and home life, between student life and the professional world and between Cabrini-Green and the mahogany trimmed offices of elite law firms around the city. In this way, mentors help to develop networks of support (i.e. social capital) around the youth that increase their opportunities for success, ensuring they stay on the right track through junior high and high schools, continue with higher education and enter a career by the age of 25.