UPDATE: On January 17th, Cabrini Connections launched its second annual Cabrini Madness fundraising tournament. 13 teams have formed consisting of students, volunteers, staff and board members, and people from outside of the program. Each team has created a fundraising page, many on GiveForward, to collect donations.

We hope that as a “fan” of Cabrini Connections tutor/mentor program you will select one of these teams to support. As we approach March, teams will be organizing special campaigns and events to raise money and as the real NCAA men’s basketball tournament gets going, Cabrini Madness will make its Elite 8 and Final 4 cuts at the same time. Individual donations to teams can be made now through April 5th. Thank you!

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UPDATE: From Sept. to Dec. 31, 2009, friends of Cabrini Connections donated $7400 through this GiveForward page. From January through April, students, volunteers and friends donated another $22,400.

We hope that during the rest of 2010 our friends and supporters will match this level of giving, and help us find the dollars needed to keep mentoring and tutoring activities growing as we enter the 2010-22 school year. For complete information about our activities, visit http://www.cabriniconnections.net.

Cabrini Connections, Tutor/Mentor Connection (CC-TMC) is a small organization with a big vision. We believe that there should be comprehensive, volunteer-based tutor/mentor programs in every low-income inner-city neighborhood of Chicago, its suburbs, and every other city in the country. Such programs would be a benefit to your employees and their extended families, as well as to many of your customers.

Our PURPOSE is to provide an organized framework that empowers and encourages volunteers to give their time, skills, and support in seeking life-changing solutions for children who live in an educationally, disadvantaged environment. We use poverty maps, showing all areas of the Chicago region where such programs are needed.

Our strategy works on three levels:

• we mentor teens and volunteers at a Cabrini-Green area tutor/mentor program called Cabrini Connections

• through the Tutor/Mentor Connection (T/MC) we mentor hundreds of organizations in Chicago and around the country that provide tutoring/mentoring services to thousands of inner-city and at-risk youth

• we also mentor and coach business, philanthropy, media, and other institutions to help them be more strategically involved with volunteer-based mentoring programs that aim to help youth move from poverty to careers

Since 1993 the organization’s Cabrini Connections program has provided mentoring-to-career support for more than 575 low-income, inner-city teens living in the Cabrini-Green area of Chicago. 58% of these teens have been in one-on-one mentoring for two or more years and 36% for three or more years. We will have 70 teens and nearly 80 volunteers enrolled in the 2010-11 program.

The Tutor/Mentor Connection (T/MC) was formed in 1993. Its goal is to help volunteer based tutor/mentor programs like Cabrini Connections grow in all poverty neighborhoods of the city and suburbs. The T/MC has created an extensive database of Chicago area tutor/mentor programs, an Internet resource library that links Chicago programs to each other and to best practices from around the country, a year- round public awareness campaign, and a series of networking and training events that draw volunteers and donors to individual programs, while helping each program learn ideas that enable them to constantly improve.

All of this intends to draw visitors to maps of Chicago (http://www.tutormentorprogramlocator.net), volunteers, donors, media, parents,  etc. shop, like customers, to determine what neighborhood they want to help, and what tutor/mentor program in that neighborhood they will help, based on how the web site of that program shows what the do to help connect volunteers and kids.

Money raised through the cause that our volunteers launch in the coming year will help pay the rent, utilities, insurance, staff and other costs of operating the Cabrini Connections, Tutor/Mentor Connection programs and making their services freely available to our teens, and to others from throughout Chicago.