Showing posts with label workforce development. Show all posts
Showing posts with label workforce development. Show all posts

Saturday, March 7, 2009

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

Wednesday, September 17, 2008

Tutor/Mentor Programs as Workforce Development

As promised in my last post, this post is dedicated to the idea that companies should be promoting volunteering at tutor/mentor programs among their employees as a form of workforce development. At first, it may not seem logical why businesses should have any interest in promoting volunteerism among their employees, particularly when it has no relation to the mission of their company or is outside their sector. However, recent joint research report by the Points of Light Foundation and the Center for Corporate Citizenship at Boston College argues that employee volunteer programs (EVPs) if implemented strategically, can actually produce positive returns on corporate investment, while providing sorely-needed resources to the organizations and causes that they are partnered with.

For instance, benefits include improvements in these following areas:

:: Employee morale, which can lead to greater company loyalty. An EVP brings about more face-to-face interaction among colleagues, leading to deeper relationships between employees. EVPs can also keep employees engaged by breaking the monotony and isolation of many low-skilled jobs and help employees to see themselves as more than another cog in the machine.

:: Recruiting tools--company support for employee volunteering involvement provides an additional incentive for strong candidates to accept job offers and helps increase the company's access to the best available people.

:: Employee skills development--participation in volunteer activities helps employees develop new skills and leverage their current skills in addressing community needs An EVP provides an opportunity for employees to: demonstrate an ability in taking on new and different responsibilities, broaden skill sets, get noticed by management and become "promotable" and build competencies through an employment-related volunteer activity.

:: Company image within the community, which can help to differentiate a company from its competition. EVPs provide opportunities for companies to: improve brand recognition, maintain positive perceptions, be a "good neighbor" in the community and meet expectations that the company is involved in communities where the employees live and work

:: Reputation among investors and consumers as a responsible corporate citizen

Each of the aforementioned areas have been investigated empirically through various research inititatives by groups at Walker Information Inc., the Corporate Citizenship Company, Consulting Network and the Institue for Volunteer Research.

As you can see, both employers and employees have much to gain through participation in Employee Volunteer Programs. Additionally, when employers take the responsibility of recruiting high-quality volunteers, tutor/mentor programs like Cabrini Connections do not need to expend so much effort and resources in our yearly volunteer recruitment campaigns. One of our goals is to encourage volunteerism among professionals as part of workforce development. We want leaders within companies and organizations to encourage employees, customers and vendors to participate in volunteer based tutor/mentor programs and to support this involvement with actions that encourage information sharing, process improvement, and employee growth.

We acknowledge that there are numerous companies that are already promoting Employee Volunteer Programs within their internal networks, or intranets. We also want to link those networks to web sites that connect volunteers with resources that are avaliable all over the web, such as those at our tutor/mentor institute or tutor/mentor connection so that they can benefit from the wealth of information that can develop them as tutors and/or mentors and perhaps direct them to further engagement with tutoring/mentoring in the future.