Tutor Mentor Connection

It's been practically a month since I got the word on my next partner for the Nonprofit Blog Exchange. The email about my partner, Tutor Mentor Connection sits a the top of my inbox, and every now and then, I go see what Daniel Bassill has to say over there.

Nowadays, I am especially interested in Daniel's ideas, since the grassroots neighborhood organization I'm working for, West End Ministries, has from the beginning been dedicated to providing youth with activities, connections and a safe place to hang out. These days, we are in real trouble, too. The county commissioners, the United Way, and one other funder of our Boys and Girls club have dropped their funding and our club is threatened with being closed.

Daniel Bassill's dedication to the notion that it is through mentoring, throught connecting young people with those who can really guide them into the mainstream where the careers are located rings very true to me. I also like his ideas about leadership, and how it is through teaching leadership that we encourage our young people to step up to make contributions to the community and society.

I've also noticed that Daniel is a fan of the internet and of blogging. Me, too.

The nonprofit blog exchange does us all a big favor, getting these possibly not very similar pairs of bloggers together to read a bit of each others' blogs and comment on them. It gets me out of the box of simply techie sites and, in Tutor Mentor Connection's case, into a field that I knew little about but that actually touches my own organization's most critical need right now. Maybe the tutor-mentor model is more workable than trying to find suitable youth leaders who are paid to put on programming for young people in one building. The mentoring relationship breaks out of those walls. Or maybe this would be a catalyst to getting more funding for the club, by getting more people directly involved with our youth.

Well, at any rate, I'm going to send our program manager over to this blog and to Daniel Massill's various sites. We'll get not only a blog exchange but a good lively discussion at work out of this.

seeks to connect people who from around the world with information and networks that help support the growth of comprehensive, voluteer based tutor/mentor programs.

Comments

[Dan Bassill]

Thanks for introducing yourself on the http://tutormentor.blogspot.com blog. I hope you'll blog with me during August, talking about how volunteers are needed in small organizations like yours, and how these volunteers can serve as tutors, mentors, coaches, fund raisers and leaders.

As we do this, we can draw volunteers to programs, and also show how important it is for leadership staff to be available who can support the involvement of many different types and skills of volunteers.

Non profits are expected to produce first class results, but without the type of business work force, or financial resources, that are available in the for profit world. To me, that means that those who manage volunteers, need extra skills. These grow with experience.

If donors want the results our agencies were set up to produce, they need to make the long term investments in staff that enable us to develop a volunteer-based workforce, and to focus it on doing this work.

If more non profit leaders will write about this at key times each year, our collective voice can have a greater impact than each of us telling this story on our own.

[Dan Bassill]

Hi Patricia,

On my blog I point to examples of students acting as journalists, teling the story and helping us recruit volunteers and donors.

On the home page of http://www.tutormentorexchange.net I've added a flash animation of one of the PPT essays I created. This work was done by an intern from Hong Kong Baptist University, working with me for the summer.

These illustrate ways that youth serving organizations can engage their own youth in building visibility and drawing volunteers and donors to programs. I encourage you to apply this in your own program's efforts.