Top Ten Reasons why Chicago needs a Comprehensive Chicago Directory of Youth Violence Resources - Part I

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Here's a question that will either put you to sleep or strike you as a crucial first step in Chicago's long-term goal of making itself a safe city for all Chicagoans, not just some. The idea would be to make Chicago the safest big city in America (as any Chicago mayor would be proud to call it) not just in terms of low crime rates but in terms of low levels of youth violence of all kinds.

The question: In Chicago how great is the need for a searchable, accessible, comprehensive and current directory of resources that all Chicagoans, young and old, can use to reduce violence in their families, neighborhoods citywide and even region-wide? This would be a multimedia, multi-device, neighborhood specific list of resources made specific to all 77 Chicago neighborhoods. It would be made available in versions designed for five audiences:

1. Young people
2. Adults: parents, teachers, community leaders 
3. Donors (foundations, individuals, businesses) and Advertisers (businesses)
4. Chicago's media
5. City Hall and other policy makers at local, state, national levels.

This directory would gather, publicize and constantly update all resources and kinds of resources - educational, public and mental health, criminal justice, jobs and careers, recreational, cultural, spiritual - relating to the reduction of youth violence in Chicago.

Most everyone who's working to reduce youth violence in Chicago tells me the need for such a directory is urgent. Why? I see all kinds of reasons, all of them, when you think of it, stemming from the information bottleneck that denies every Chicagoan including policy makers full awareness of existing youth violence resources! (BTW, the term information bottleneck came from a smart young man - I  never got his name - who spoke at the June 25 meeting of the Parents' Political University in Austin.)

I've been thinking about this topic recently and came up with a Letterman-style Top Ten list of reasons for it:

Very funny Dave,  but what matters in Chicago is children and kids' lives, not dogs and pet peeves.

So here goes: Chicagoland needs a comprehensive directory of youth violence resources so it can

10. Begin to do what the Bears, Bulls, Cub, Sox and Blackhawks already do in spades for the entire Chicagoland region: unify city and suburban residents alike. A comprehensive youth violence directory of city/surburban resources will be a crucial first step in the ongoing process of empowering all Chicagoans to be as committed to their city and region's future as they are to the futures of their pro sports teams. 

Note. This directory would not only list suburban as well as city resources but also list resources for all kinds of youth violence: bullying, sexual, self-harm, and domestic. All of these in addition to the gun/gang/drug kinds of violence that are usually associated with the city. (And don't forget that the suburbs now have 15,000 gang members, as compared to the city's 100,000 or more, according to Chicago Crime Council's 2012 Gang Book.) 

Note 1. Drug use in the suburbs is about the same as in the city, as the authoritative Illinois Youth Survey confirms. For many years, the Survey has found that past 30-day use of marijuana, for instance, has been almost 30% for city and suburban high school seniors alike (though the 2014 findings for the city appear to show a higher rate in the city.

Over the years there's been some (but not enough) good reporting on the link between city/suburban drug use and drug distribution:

Here (Chicago Tribune, Jean Latz Griffin, 1986, terrific article)

Here (Chicago Tribune, Robert McCoppin, 2009

Here (WBEZ radio, Chip Mitchell, heckuva story from Mexico in 2013)

Here (Huffington Post, with links to Mike Dumpke's WBEZ/Chicago Reader series about West Side heroin dealing as a business proposition, 2014)

Here (Chicago Tribune, John Keilman and Matt Walberg, 2014)

Note 2. About the suburbs: I've lived in suburban Glenview for the past 16 years. My experience of suburban public schools - including several top-ranked Illinois high school schools, at one of which my son is now a junior - has been that up 30% of students at these schools suffer from forms of violence for which students see drug abuse, initially at least, as a way to reduce pain or simply to get to sleep. And because media pay almost zero attention to these kinds of youth violence, there are almost no community-wide efforts to address them.

9.  Give all Chicagoans, city and suburban, some hard evidence that Chicago is at long last  beginning to address all forms of its systemic youth violence problem systemically,

8.  Give researchers in area universities data for use in developing city and region wide strategies for addressing youth violence. For instance, for determining which city neighborhoods are underserved or overserved with youth violence resources.

7.  Give Chicago's elementary and secondary schools neighborhood-specific resources that teachers and staff can use in two ways: to help individual students and to give entire student bodies a sense of belonging to their local communities,

6.  Generate volunteers for the mostly non-profit organizations that provide these resources: volunteer tutors and mentors, for instance, for the approximately 200,000 CPS students who currently need them,

5.  Connect existing violence reduction groups with each other so they can interact more efficiently and cooperatively with each other, including creating collaborations to raise funds or to improve program outcomes.

4.  Give Chicago's media reliable, detailed information for their use in supplementing their existing Crime Story coverage of youth violence with Full Story (use this link, not the screenshot below) coverage that empowers Chicagoans to be problem solvers as opposed to mourners or victims of youth violence,

How Chicago's public information system - its media - can give Chicagoans the tools they need to reduce youth violence in their neighborhoods.

3.  Give prospective funders - foundations, business groups and private donors - comprehensive information about existing violence reduction resources. The need here is to remedy the drastic shortage of funds that currently hampers the efforts of all but a very few existing violence reduction groups.

2. Inform government leaders at city, state, and national levels whose often astonishing ignorance of existing resources, including the absence of resources in the neighborhoods that need them most, prevents government at all levels from addressing youth violence effectively,

1. Remedy the information bottleneck that denies Chicagoans living in the city's roughest neighborhoods access to existing violence reduction resources already available to them in their neighborhoods. The tragedy here is of lives lost because Chicagoans did not know about resources that could have saved lives: likely hundreds or thousands of lives had all Chicagoans had access to a reliable and comprehensive directory of these resources five or ten years go.

OK, so why hasn't Chicago had a directory like this for decades? Good question for our Aldermen and State Representatives and Senators. And our Congressmen and Senators in Washington. And for City Hall and citywide organizations like Chicago Community Trust and United Way. Better question: what will it take for Chicago to get one?

Two people I know - Becky Levin of Strengthening Chicago's Youth (SCY) and Dan Bassill of the Tutor/Mentor Institute - have worked hard to create a directory like this. Their answer? You guessed it. It's money. But to my knowledge, no one has ever attempted even an informal cost estimate for directory like this, let alone advanced strategies for underwriting the costs of creating one, keeping it current, and disseminating it to all Chicagoans.

So Part II of this post will do three things. It will

• Give a rough estimate of the three costs of creating, disseminating and maintaining such a directory. By "rough" I mean really rough: to the nearest million or even five million. After decades of failed, piecemeal efforts to empower Chicagoans to reduce youth violence and save lives citywide, I expect that this directory, with its life-saving, city-unifying capabilities, would easily be worth $20 million. But I bet costs would a fraction of that amount.
• If this estimate sounds off the wall, bear in mind the $51 million cost of the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods (PHDCN), a magnificent and epic survey of Chicago neighborhoods conducted between 1995 and 2005 that was underwritten by the MacArthur Foundation and the U.S. Department of Justice. 
• The tragedy of PHDCN and its splendid finding of the value of neighborhood collective efficacy is that, upon completion, nothing ever came of it. Nothing! 
• As PHDCN's Lead Investigator, Felton Earls, said (discretely) at a 2013 Harvard Club of Chicago presentation, Chicago simply dropped the ball on PHDCN after its completion. $51 million down the drain, so far as Chicago was concerned. Undaunted, Earls went to successfully implement collective efficacy in Tanzania and Costa Rica, focusing on children as change agents.

• Part II will also throw out some ideas as to how a Citywide directory might be funded. These will focus on:
• A multisource or "rainbow" spectrum of funders based on mutually beneficial partnerships created among existing violence reduction groups, funders, City Hall, Chicago's media, major and local advertisers and the people of Chicago, including Chicago's young people.

• Finally, Part II will list two kinds of aggregators of existing youth violence reduction organizations in Chicago: convenors of these groups and creators of (partial) directories of them. Here are three groups that fullfill both functions:
• Strengthening Chicago's Youth (SCY) has aggregated some 200 groups. And it holds quarterly meetings to connect them on topics of mutual concern.
• Mayor Emanuel's Commission for a Safer Chicago is doing likewise. Here's the six-page Executive Summary of its Strategic Plan for 2015, which lists 130 participants.  Here's the full 68 page Plan which, among other things, proposes a mobile-device accessible directory of community resources for young people to be housed at the Chicago City of Learning site: 

• A third convenor/aggregator group is the Tutor/Mentor Institute. T/MI convenes existing organizations at its bi-annual Tutor/Mentor conferences (next one: May 8, 2015) and aggregates scores of organizations. Director Dan Bassill is a systems thinker whose blogs and websites will give you free and full access to hundreds of his hyperlinked maps. This one, below, instantly links you to some thirty local groups. And it's current to January 15, 2015. (To access an organization's website on it, just click on the little gray box, then click the link that shows up)

Incremental Vrs Systemic Change: A message to Chicago's Foundations.

Hullo John D. and Catherine T.  Every year around this time you roll out your genius awards, and every year,  including 2014, I find myself wondering why on earth so many of these coveted awards go to established artists, poets, musicians, novelists and scientists - and why so few go to the little-known sociologists, city planners and community activists whose big ideas, duly recognized, could go far to helping cities like Chicago define and solve, at long last, the set of youth-victimizing problems that over the past fifty years have destroyed the lives millions of young Americans. If this number sounds unrealistic, just take a look at America's prison population today:

Setting this graphic next to your list of 2014 awardees, I can only think that MacArthur has its priorities wrong: that its finger is more on the pulse of an American cultural elite than that of the nation itself. I know you won't agree. At your website, you proudly assert that four of this year's 22 genius have been active in

Designing new strategies to address persistent social challenges such as securing fair and affordable housing (John Henneberger), protecting civil rights (Mary L. Bonauto), and ensuring equal access to justice for both the victims of crime (Sarah Deer) and the accused (Jonathan Rapping);

Given America's precipitous decline at home and abroad, four "persistent social challenge" awardees out of 22 is not enough. Year after year MacArthur gives its genius awards to like the four named above, but guess what: nothing changes. America's criminal justice system remains broken. Poor people can find affordable housing. And new, completely unforeseen threats arise to the civil rights of Americans everywhere.


And arguably, things only get worse. With each election America's political system becomes more money-driven and dysfunctional at local, state and national levels. This year's four social challenge awardees are surely brilliant, dedicated, deserving people. But I dare say that they themselves would agree that their work was never intended, in and of itself, to do what America needs most: to restore functionality to its political decision making process.

Fact is that dozens of geniuses overlooked by MacArthur are devoting their lives to this end. So what keeps MacArthur from acknowledging them?  Could it be that its rigid adherence to the principle of incremental change prevents it from attending to and rewarding proponents of the systemic change that alone will restore functionality to American governments?

The spirit of incrementalism is commonly expressed in the saying that the best way way to eat an elephant is one bite at a time. It's gospel among Chicago foundations. I recall my stomach turning first time I heard it years ago. Who, I thought, wants to eat an elephant in the first place?   
Designing new strategies to address persistent social challenges such as securing fair and affordable housing (John Henneberger), protecting civil rights (Mary L. Bonauto), and ensuring equal access to justice for both the victims of crime (Sarah Deer) and the accused (Jonathan Rapping); - See more at: Given America's precipitous decline at home and abroad, four "persistent social challenge" awardees out of 22 is not enough. Year after year MacArthur gives its genius awards to like the four named above, but guess what: nothing changes. America's criminal justice system remains broken. Poor people can find affordable housing. And new, completely unforeseen threats arise to the civil rights of Americans everywhere.


And arguably, things only get worse. America's political system becomes more dysfunctional at local, state and national levels with each election. This year's four social challenge awardees are doubtless brilliant, dedicated, deserving people. But I dare say that they themselves would readily agree that their work was never intended, in and of itself, to do what America needs most: to restore functionality to its political decision making process.

In fact dozens of geniuses overlooked by MacArthur are devoting their lives to this end. So what keeps MacArthur from acknowledging them?  Could it be an addiction to the principle of incremental change that keeps America's foundations from supporting geniuses who dedicate themselves to the systemic change that alone will restore functionality to American government?

The spirit of incrementalism is commonly expressed in the notion that the best way way to eat an elephant is one bite at a time. This saying is gospel among Chicago foundations. I recall my stomach turning first time I heard it many years ago. Who, I thought, wants to eat an elephant in the first place?   

Poor beast. Are large (systemic) problems things to be eaten . . . or solved?

I've been following Chicago's schools for thirty years. It's hard for me not to see the plight of Chicago's schools and young people today, and the tangle of foundations, media, government entities and underfunded non-profits that desperately try to support them, as the result of thirty years of small thinking going by the name of incrementalism. 

All this will change only when foundations see wisdom of identifying and supporting competent proponents of systemic change. Using the foundation-approved image of the bitten elephant, one might say that things will change for the better only when foundations embrace the holistic and systemic principle that the best way to support (not eat) an elephant is to connect it with other elephants. 

For two reasons this idea stands up under scrutiny. Consider, first, that elephants are closely connected herd animals. And second, bear in mind that students of media since Marshall McLuhan have correctly predicted that electronic communications technologies are rapidly "retribalizing the human race" and creating a global village in which everyone is always in touch with everyone else. (The deeper we go into the age of electronic media, the closer we come to mother Africa).
  

Always Connected

Now let's return to Chicago, a city where new forms of electronic media and new attempts to deal with youth violence have been popping up for decades like mushrooms on a warm fall day. Yet no one - not even Mayor Emanuel - can say that Chicago has turned the corner on youth violence.

So who in Chicago is working to connect all Chicagoans (including City Hall) to turn the corner on youth violence? As I will be arguing in a later post, I see the Tribune's New Plan of Chicago as taking a big if imperfect step in this direction. Also, the Strengthening Chicago's Youth (SCY) Program at Lurie Childrens' Hospital has assembled a list of several hundred non-profits, academic institutions, foundations, businesses and government agencies that collectively are actively addressing virtually all of the complex set of factors that contribute to youth violence.

What's needed, as I see it, are communications platforms that enable these entities to connect with each other and with the people of Chicago, especially young people. Dan Bassill's work at the Tutor/Mentor Institute, described in my September 22 post, below, comes closest to providing such a platform.

 

Yo MacArthur: Dan Bassill of Chicago's Tutor/Mentor Connection Deserves Your Genius Award

Hullo John D. and Catherine T.   Every year around this time you roll out your genius awards, and every year,  including 2014, I find myself wondering why on earth so many of these coveted awards go to established artists, poets, musicians, novelists and scientists - and why so few go to the little-known sociologists, city planners and community activists whose big ideas, duly recognized, could go far to helping cities like Chicago define and solve, at long last, the set of youth-victimizing problems that over the past fifty years have destroyed the lives of so many young Americans.

So who's my choice to receive a MacArthur Genius award in 2015? It's Dan Bassill, a big-picture systems thinker from Chicago who over the past twenty years has quietly developed a massive, interactive online database which, fully implemented, would connect and empower thousands of talented Chicagoans (including city leaders) to give 200,000 at risk Chicago youngsters the educational skills they need to in order to enter and in create a world that is free from youth violence.

I'm not alone in my assessment of Bassill.  Phil Shapiro of PC World magazine made the case for him five years ago.

Dan Bassill (left) listening, as he usually does

"Only Connect" E. M. Forster said it first, but it could serve as Dan Bassill's motto. He's a systems engineer and a former marketing executive with a major corporation.

First thing about Dan: his body of written work is online, free and available for anyone to use.  He's given it away. His overriding concern is simple: it's to give people - young people, adults, non-profits, government agencies - the online tools they need to connect with each other. He's equally committed to showing people how to use these tools.

Second thing: Dan's written work consists of a array of scores of elaborate graphical strategy maps - of maps within maps within maps - and of hundreds of graphics, blog posts, newsletters. All told, this body of work gives Chicago a virtual roadmap that Chicagoans can use to comprehensively and holistically address youth violence and related (especially educational) issues in Chicago.

All of this, I think, is the stuff of genius, but it's only genius on paper.  As it turns out, Dan Bassill as much a doer as a thinker. In 1992 he founded the Cabrini Connections to serve kids in Chicago's Cabrini Green complex. This he did after leading the Montgomery Ward-Cabrini-Green Tutoring Program (Now Tutoring Chicago) from 1975-1992). While Dan and six other volunteers were creating Cabrini Connections, they decided to fill a leadership void and went on to create the Tutor/Mentor Connection so that tutor/mentor programs could grow in all high poverty areas of Chicago. Over the years, he assembled and oversaw the training of a network of hundreds of volunteers who by now have tutored thousands of kids citywide.

Dan maintains his ties with people in bi-annual conferences that he has been hosting in Chicago for the past 20 years.  This year, his 42nd Tutor/Mentor Leadership and Networking Conference will be held November 7 at the Metcalfe Federal Building at 77 W. Jackson Blvd in Chicago. Here's a list of 35 participants.

All told, Dan's online productions comprise far and away the most effective approach to community-based decision making  I've ever seen.  It takes time to master them,  as might be expected of any work of genius. But to spend time with them, and with Dan, is to marvel at the failure of entities like City Hall and the Chicago Tribune (with its "holistic", "bottom-up" New Plan of Chicago) to make good use of Dan's resources as tools to help Chicago neighborhoods address systemic problems like youth violence and poverty.

Dan and I recently spent several hours online together with him giving me a tour of his online world created. We saw about 40% of it. 60% remains unseen His sites:

• Tutor/Mentor Connection (best place to get acquainted)
• Tutor/Mentor Institute Facebook 
• Tutor/Mentor Leadership and Networking Conference November 7 2014 in Chicago
• Tutor/Mentor Institute Blog  (Dan's posts responding to the issues of the day)
• Tutor/Mentor Exchange (for when you are ready to dive in)
• Tutor/Mentor Newsletter (for those already connected with the T/MC Institute)

Here's a sample of how Dan would broaden public participation in addressing youth violence in Chicago. It riffs off Chicago Tribune coverage of the shooting last August of nine-year old Antonio Smith. Dan like to move from simplistic media coverage of youth violence to hands-on solutions of the problems that underlie it. Here's a blog post that moves past the sensationalism of a Sun-Times 2009 "Killing Field" story towards discourse that would enable Chicagoans to become active problem-solvers.

One of the first maps Dan showed me recently was this “Make it your own” map, which links to his 4 part Strategy map (below), whose hyperlinks triggered and hour-long discussion between us about how to address complex phenomena (like big-city youth violence and poor academic achievement) holistically and systemically.

Dan’s maps are by no means fully self-explanatory. Your starter map will give you a sequential train of thought (connect by lines, as above) that is enriched by hyperlinks at each numbered point that link you to other maps. Soon you find yourself in a world of maps within maps, so go slow; don't move from map to any faster that you can think about the connection you are making.

It helped me no end that Dan, as he zipped around from one map to the next, was sitting next to me to explain them. I took notes and later spent a couple hours revisiting everything he'd shown me.Things then made sense.

So getting into Dan's maps is a learning process. But the payoff is huge. IF I can get other people as excited about them as Dan got me the payoff is guaranteed. Why be excited? Dan convinced me that people of all ages - teens especially - can use his maps and mapping tools (they're free online) to enable individuals and groups large and small to learn from the past, to deal with present, and to make both short and long range plans for the future.

In 2011 Dan created the Tutor/Mentor Institute, LLC to continue the work of his Tutor/Mentor Connection. As Dan says, "the tax structure may be different, but the job ahead is the same: to get money to do what's needed to be done."

And in learning to create them, teens develop skills that employers will value. Definitely I want to connect Dan and leaders of Parents Political University, with which CCM is working in Chicago's West Side Austin neighborhood.

That's it for now, John D. and Catherine T. Thanks for listening.