Documenting actions that lead to growth of volunteer-based tutor/mentor programs

[Daniel Bassill]

This chart is on the home page of the Tutor/Mentor Connection OHATS (Organizational History and Tracking System) web site. Every time a recorder documents an action related to the Mission of the T/MC, the pie chart changes, as do the other metrics charts on the web site.

Thus, the more people who take on recorder roles, and document actions that relate the T/MC mission, the more success well have of attracting volunteers, donors, technology and other resources that help individual tutor/mentor programs grow in places where they are needed.

We launched this in 2000 and were successful in recruiting a small group of others to be recorders. By 2002 we had documented more than 500 actions. However, the site did not have the interactive reporting features it has now, and thus the more we documented, the less people were willing to read what we were doing. We also did not have an evaluator working with us after 2002, to "make sense" of the information, and thus could not produce reports summarizing the impact of these actions. Finally, the site began to take on spam, and we shut it down in 2005-6.

In mid 2007 a volunteer from Baltimore (I'm in Chicago) offered to help and he built the current site, with its interactive features. If you want to review some of the actions documented, you can log in as GUEST and password, VISITOR.

This site works best with Internet Explorer.

This demonstrates a few things.

One, unless people document actions toward goals (cause and affect), it's difficult to understand if a group of people are actually making progress toward their goals. It's also difficult to know if all members of the group are contributing actions toward shared purpose.

Two, we can find help from beyond our own staff, neighborhood, or city. The volunteer helping me is in Baltimore, but his company is India, and that's where the work was done.

Three, Non profits struggling to do good work can find help in many places if they use the Internet the way we are. Business volunteers from many places can be helping us build the T/MC in Chicago, and can use what we're doing here, in their own communities.