The Tutor/Mentor Connection (T/MC) mission 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 in inner city Chicago and other poverty areas. Intro to T/MC and Cabrini Connections (pdf)

The Tutor/Mentor Connection and Cabrini Connections are two parts of the same small Chicago non profit organization.
The T/MC idea originated over the past 45 years, starting when employees of the Montgomery Ward Corporation in Chicago began to go to a Cabrini Green building every Tuesday evening during the school year to tutor 2nd to 6th grade kids. In 1970 this program moved to the corporate headquarters of Wards and in 1973 Dan Bassill, the founder of Cabrini Connections and the Tutor/Mentor Connection, joined the advertising department at Wards, and became a volunteer with the program. In 1975 Bassill be came the volunteer leader of the program and one of his first actions was to begin to bring together leaders of similar programs in Chicago to learn from them ideas he could apply to his own efforts. In the 35 years since then this networking and learning has expanded to reach people from around the world.

Yet the purpose of this networking and learning is to find ways to connect youth with workplace volunteers and to keep them together for many years so that the youth is gaining and expanded network of adults who help him/her finish school and enter a job, while the volunteer is becoming more personally engaged, and committed to doing "everything they can" to help this happen.

The ideas shared on this Tutor/Mentor Institute site are used in the Cabrini Connections program, and are available to anyone else working with youth in Chicago or the world. You can learn more about the Cabrini Connections program by visiting the links on the left side of the home page.