Dear GKD Members,
I'm not sure that Janice Brodman's story about isolated NGOs in
Bosnia-Herzegovina trying to find private donors is much different from
small non profits in rich countries trying to find private donors. I'm
sure there are advantages to being in the US, but small charities still
struggle to find donors.
I think the suggestion of creating a database is a good one and I offer
the Tutor/Mentor Connection (T/MC) as a model that could be duplicated
to fill this need.
In 1993 when the T/MC was created its founders recognized the following
need:
a) concentrated, segregated poverty in America's largest cities was the
root cause of many social problems, ranging from high costs of health
care and prevention services, to high rates of incarceration, high
concentrations of poorly performing public schools, and small numbers of
minority youth moving from inner-city schools to jobs/careers in
industry and in professions such as math, science, engineering.
b) while many people talked of the benefits of engaging more adults in
the lives of inner city kids, as tutors, mentors, coaches, etc., there
was no master database showing what programs were doing this, where they
were located, who they served, etc. Without such a database, there was
no strategy to help existing programs get the resources they need to
constantly improve or expand to reach more kids, nor to help new groups
form programs in neighborhoods where there were voids in services.
So myself and a few volunteers created the Tutor/Mentor Connection:
a) we began creating a database of tutor/mentor programs, as well as of
related services. What I mean by this is that getting an adult involved
as a tutor/mentor is just one of many ways adults and businesses need to
be involved in helping a youth who is starting first grade today, be
starting a job/career 20 years later. Thus, our database tries to
identify all of the programs involved in this pipeline to careers.
b) we began hosting conferences and creating public awareness with the
purpose of drawing dollars and volunteers directly to the programs we
had in our database, while encouraging those programs to come together
more frequently to share ideas, network, and work together to achieve
public awareness and increase the flow of resources.
We did not have any funding to do this and have relied on volunteers and
ad-hoc partners to build and sustain the T/MC for the past 12 years. In
1997 we began to put our information on a web site and now if you search
Google for the words tutor mentor our web sites come up in the top 10
or 20 of many listings.
At http://msg.uc.iupui.edu/TMC/html/index.php you can see a new web
site that we're launching next month to replace the
www.tutormentorconnection.org site. This was created for us by the
technology department of IUPUI, which is a university located in
Indianapolis, Indiana. I'm In Chicago, Illinois. All of the components
of this web site are open source resources.
Many of the maps on this web site were created by a volunteer from
Wisconsin who I first met through this GKD discussion forum almost 5
years ago!
This illustrates that someone on the GKD List, or a forum such as
www.digitaldivide.net, can take a role in building a web site with a
links database that could be used to collect information about NGOs
working in different countries around the world. If the various NGOs
worked together to draw attention to the database, I could begin to draw
attention from donors. If it were to include GIS maps, such as those we
demonstrate on the T/MC web site, the distribution of resources is more
likely to go to more of the countries where help is needed than to just
a few high profile organizations or countries.
We've built the Tutor/Mentor Connection with very little consistent
private sector support , but with the help of many people who shared our
concern for kids living in poverty. We're constantly looking for people
around the world to help us build the T/MC's tech platform, with the
goal of using it in their own country while we use it in Chicago.
Thus, you're welcome to look at the T/MC and duplicate its concepts if
that helps you build the type of database/web site you have in mind. I
think that there must be others who would help you and others in
countries like Bosnia-Herzegovina.
If anyone would like to know more about the T/MC, or join in its
efforts, I'd be happy to talk to you here, or in the discussion area of
the new web site.
Daniel F. Bassill
President
Tutor/Mentor Connection
Cabrini Connections
800 W. Huron
Chicago, IL, USA
***GKD is solely supported by EDC, a Non-Profit Organization***
To post a message, send it to: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To subscribe or unsubscribe, send a message to:
[EMAIL PROTECTED]. In the 1st line of the message type:
subscribe gkd OR type: unsubscribe gkd
Archives of previous GKD messages can be found at:
http://www.edc.org/GLG/gkd/
