Students as agents of change - 'The Rest of the Story'

Youth from middle school through graduate school could be taking this role.

I’m going to show a few slides from one of my visual essays. I hope you’ll open the PDF and look at all of them.

Over on LinkedIn I’ve been exchanging ideas with Daniel Max Crowley, a professor at Penn State University, such as on this post. In his comment he wrote: “your model treats students not just as learners, but as part of the infrastructure that helps ideas move into communities. Universities have millions of students. Most spend years learning about marketing, communications, data science, public policy, education, business, and technology. Yet relatively little of that capacity is organized around helping communities solve real problems while students are learning. I wonder how much impact we could create if we treated student talent as a civic asset, not just a workforce pipeline.”

When I created the Tutor/Mentor Connection in 1993 I borrowed many ideas from my 17 years in retail advertising at the corporate headquarter in Chicago. They spent millions of dollars each week to tell potential customers about merchandise and services offered at our 400 stores.

We created a 4-part strategy, which I show on this concept map. I wrote about this last fall (click here). While step 1 is aggregating information, step 2 involves sharing that information with a constantly expanding reach and daily frequency.

I never had significant funding, and very few dollars for PR or advertising, thus I developed a strategy that leveraged local media and invited others to “tell the story”. The slides below are part of the visual essay that I’ve asked you to study.

This slide shows the duo challenge of time (it takes 12 years to go from 1st to 12th grade) and space (a map of Chicago shows many neighborhoods where organized youth-serving programs for each age group are needed).

In order for good programs to be available someone has to provide consistent, on-going and flexible funding, to hire, train and retain talented people. They are the glue that attracts youth and volunteers.

Many recognize this. Too few have strategies that fix the problem. Many talk about involving young people in decision-making. I’m proposing teaching them to be “influencers” and “network builders”, connecting people in the ecosystem with each other, and with needed resources.

Visit the Intern blog at http://michaelcnt.blogspot.com and see how interns have helped share the ideas I’ve posted on my blog and website.

What if students in high schools across the Chicago region (or your city) adopted this as an on-going learning and leadership activity? Read this article where I show library sites in New York City and describe this idea.

Colleges and Universities are spread more thinly through the region, but each could also have a program like I and Dr. Crowley are describing. They just need a donor to motivate them to take that role.

During the 1975-1992 years I saw a steady stream of stories about violence, poorly performing schools, gang involvement, incarceration, health disparities, etc. Occasionally these would rise to full page. However, the stories would only point to a few locations, and last for only a few day. That’s not how advertising works.

So how do we create frequent stories without a budget? Add it to what kids learn as they go through school. Imagine how much skill a youth might earn if they were part of this process each year from 4th grade through 12th grade, or through graduate school!

This is a long visual essay with many slides. These show a goal of having a “rest of the story” tab on media, business, faith group, political, entertainment websites, all pointing to pages that aggregate student stories from individual schools.

I’ve used maps of Chicago since 1993 to emphasize the many areas of high poverty where organized, non-school, volunteer-based tutor/mentor and learning programs are needed. The media needs to be finishing every “bad news” story with a “go here to learn more” message.

While almost everyone recognizes how nonprofits compete with each other for a limited pool of resources, I’ve found almost no one with a 30 year campaign intended to recruit leaders from every sector who use their own visibility to draw volunteers and donors to tutor/mentor programs in their community.

It seems that full responsibility for having a great youth-serving program in a neighborhood lies with the leaders of each program. That needs to change. I wrote about this in this article.

From 1994 to 1999 the Tutor/Mentor Connection developed a quarterly event strategy, anchored by a citywide volunteer recruitment campaign in August/Sept, and leadership and networking conferences in May and November. We had a radio-campaign idea on the drawing board for February, but that never got off the ground. Instead we leveraged the January National Mentoring Month activities.

By repeating these events annually we began to draw more attention from media. See this list of stories. In a few years your school could have a page with a similar collection of articles. What if such pages could be found on hundreds of websites!

My archives are open and I’ve been transparent in showing what I’ve done over the past 30 years. I want others to use this resource as they build their own Tutor/Mentor Connection-type strategy in their community, or rebuild it in Chicago.

I’ve created a second “Rest of the Story” visual essay, showing this strategy applied to the North Lawndale area of Chicago. click here to open

Whoa! That’s a lot to read! Yes. It is. So take your time. Could you make this an independent study project for your students? Or a research project for a graduate student?

Thanks for stopping by. I hope you’ll connect with me and my network on LinkedIn and other social media sites (see links here)

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