Cabrini Connections featured on Oprah's Angel Network site

We're honored and excited to have a story about the work of Cabrini Connections, Tutor/Mentor Connection to be featured on the Oprah's Angel Network web site. I hope you'll look at this, and add your own comments telling how you've been part of Cabrini Connections, or helped by the Tutor/Mentor Connection.

Then, I hope you'll also contact the people at your company, or a friend's company, or your faith group, or family foundation, and ask them to send their own donation, or a grant application, to help us fund the work we do.

No donor provides more than a small percent of the funds needed by any tutor/mentor program in any given year. Visit our donor list for 2008 and you'll see many who have given big and small donations. This is an orchestra. Some have more talent, and a bigger capacity to help than others. However, all are needed, this year, and every year.

Our teens are 7th grade when most join us. This means it will be six years before the 7th graders are finishing high school, and another 4 to 6 years before they are in their mid 20's and beginning to become established in jobs and careers. Because of the negative influences of big city poverty, which grow stronger as kids grow older, we need to provide continued mentoring, tutoring and career coaching for each youth for many years.

In fact, we say, "once in Cabrini Connections, always in Cabrini Connections". What we mean by that is that when you are born into a family, in a wealthy neighborhood, or a poor neighborhood, you are part of that family until you die.

Depending on the community where that family lives, and where you are raised, the network of adults, and variety of learning experiences, will be far greater for most kids than it is for kids living in urban poverty.

A tutor/mentor program like Cabrini Connections builds connections between inner city kids and volunteers who don't live in poverty. The longer these kids and volunteers stay connected, the more they can benefit. Thus, our efforts to build a Cabrini Connections on Facebook, Ning, or Linked In, or in other portals is part of an effort to keep members of this family connected to each other, no matter where they move to in their adult lives.

If we can do this we end the isolation of poverty, and create a network of support that mirrors what other kids in more affluent areas are born with.

We cannot do this without sustained financial support from an orchestra of donors. While we are trying to find these donors, our web sites and your networking, helps them learn to find us, and find others doing similar work in other neighborhoods.

Stories on high profile web sites like the Oprah's Angel Network site give a big boost to this effort. However, they are just one very talented and influential member of the orchestra of support we need to build for volunteer-based tutoring and/mentoring.

Please help spread the word and build the orchestra.

Make a donation today.