Personal

Your Name

Daniel F. Bassill

Website

http://tutormentor.blogspot.com

Location

Chicago

About Yourself

More than 30 years ago I began a journey of learning that has led me to many unexpected places and created many challenges in the process. I became a volunteer tutor for a 4th grade boy living in the Cabrini-Green area in Chicago shortly after joining Montgomery Ward's national advertising staff in Chicago. In the first year of working with Leo, I never quite knew what I was trying to accomplish, and often after a busy day at work, I was really not excited to spend an hour in my volunteer role. However, the boy's mother kept telling me how good I was doing and how much he talked about me at home, and I usually had a good feeling when my weekly tutoring sessions with Leo ended.

Thus after the first year I was recruited to be part of the committee of volunteers who led the program and after the second year I was recruited to be the leader of the program. Thus in the fall of 1975, as I began my 3rd full year with Montgomery Ward, I also began a my first year of leading a program that connected workplace volunteers with inner city kids.

In the 15 years from 1975 to 1990, my advertising career grew to the point where I was manager of advertising planning and ad development for all of the national print advertising at Wards. At the same time, the volunteer program I lead grew to where it connected more than 300 pairs of 2nd to 6th grade youth with workplace volunteers in one-on-one mentoring sessions each year. You can read the rest of this journey in the About Cabrini Connections Section of www.tutormentorconnection.org.

I left my job at Wards in 1990 and converted the volunteer program to a non profit, called Cabrini Green Tutoring Program. In 1992 a small group of volunteers and myself split off from the original program to form a separate version that would mentor 7th grade kids to careers. This separate version also had a much larger vision. Our goal was to build an infrastructure that would enable comprehensive, volunteer-based tutor/mentor programs to be in every poverty neighborhood of Chicago.

We named this new organization Cabrini Connections, after the name of the neighborhood where we drew our inspiration. We called the outreach to help programs throughout the city grow the Tutor/Mentor Connection(T/MC)

The Mission of Cabrini Connections is to provide an organized framework that empowers and encourages adult volunteers to give their time, effort, ideas and advocacy in seeking life-changing solutions for children living in educationally and economically disadvantaged environments such as the Cabrini-Green housing development in Chicago.

While Cabrini Connections puts this mission to work in a single site, it also has created the Tutor/Mentor Connection (T/MC) to help all poverty neighborhoods have comprehensive, tutoring and mentoring-to-career programs. The goal of the T/MC is to gather and organize all that is known about successful non-school tutor/mentor programs and share that knowledge to expand the availability and enhance the effectiveness of these services to children throughout Chicago and any poverty area of the country.

At http://DanielFB.pledgepage.org you can see additional photos of me and some of the people I've worked with. This includes a photo showing my son and daughter who are now 8 and 15. It's my hope that the work I do to help inner city teens have a brighter future will also assure that my own kids grow up into a safer world with peace, hope and opportunity for everyone.

At my http://tutormentor.blogspot.com page you can find alist of some of the web sites of my organization.

I hope you'll visit. In all of these web sites and in the messages I post in a variety of list serves you'll see an invitation. Our goal is that others who share the same vision and have the talent, time and resources to help, will join us in making this vision a reality. If that invitation reaches your heart, I hope to hear from you.

We've received many forms of recognition for our work. However, the best reward comes daily from the feedback I receive from people who are helped by the work we do or value the services we provide. This includes parents, social workers, leaders of other tutor/mentor programs and networks, and peers from around the world who are working to help make life brighter for disadvantaged kids. Most of all, it comes from kids who have been part of the tutor/mentor program we lead, and who take the time to say "thanks". You can read a few of these at our Cabrini Connections web site.

If you read my March 2006 blog messages, you'll also find how Leo, the boy I first met over 30 years ago, emailed me recently to say "thanks".

History

Member for

2 years 40 weeks