Using Maps to point resources to all mentoring programs in a city
In New York City more than 1 million youth are in the public school system. In LA there are more than 700,000 kids and in Chicago more than 400,000. In each of these cities a large number of these kids live in neighborhoods of concentrated poverty where there are too few mentors modeling jobs and careers beyond what kids see every day in high poverty neighborhoods. These are areas where volunteer-based tutoring/mentoring programs can have a benefit.
In Chicago, we know of nearly 175 organizations offering some form of tutoring/mentoring. We've been mapping the locations of these programs since 1993, attempting to show where they are in the city, and to draw volunteers and donors to all of them on a more consistent basis.
This spring we've released two new resources which I hope you'll review and share with leaders in your own communities.
a) map gallery - this is an archive of all of the map stories we've created since early 2008 when we received a gift to rebuild our map capacity. http://www.tutormentorprogramlocator.net/mapgallery.html
b) interactive tutor/mentor program locator - http://www.tutormentorprogramlocator.net/InteractiveMap.aspx . You can zoom into different parts of the city, add lawyers of information about poverty, poor schools, potential funders and sources of volunteers, etc.
If you're in the Chicago region, you can add your own program, or edit your program's information. Just call 312-492-9614 or follow the tutorial on the web site. If you feel this is a value, we hope you'll help us introduce it to business and media and government leaders, so they use it to mobilize volunteers and donors to support all of the programs in the city, and to help us find the dollars to keep this resource updated and available at no cost to Chicago programs.
If you know of resources like this in other cities, or other social benefit categories, please post links to those sites so we can learn from them, and collaborate on building more traffic to these sites, so more volunteers and donors go through the maps to the programs operating in different areas.