Northwestern vs Illinois, on the Fund Raising Field

If you're a University of Illinois alum, or fan, visit this link and help your team win this challenge with alumni of Northwestern University.

If you're from Northwestern, or a Wildcat fan, you can support your team by making a donation at this link.

Follow this competition on the Cabrini Blog, which will end on Nov. 4 when the two teams meet on the football field.

Do your trash talking on Facebook, Linked in and in your business and social circles.

Who will win? The kids and volunteers who benefit from the services of Cabrini Connections and the Tutor/Mentor Connection.

Create Your Own Fund Raising Events to support Cabrini Connections

We've set up a group page on the GiveForward web site which you can find at http://www.giveforward.org/CabriniTMC/

Give Forward is a place where any friend, volunteer, student can create their own fund raising event and recruit donations to support the work we do at Cabrini Connections and in the Tutor/Mentor Connection. Here's some tips for using the site.

Many people who are running in marathons, are raising money for charities. If you do, you can use this space to raise money for Cabrini Connections. Many people who are getting married, or celebrating birthdays and anniversaries, also are setting up charity pages, asking friends and families to recognize them by supporting a cause they believe in.


We hope that over the coming year dozens of Cabrini Connections friends will set up their own events, and use this site to help us keep our services available to current, future, and former students and volunteers.

One $5,000 donation at a time

After the July 16th Golf Benefit I wrote how it would take donations of $5,000 each from many different sources to keep the bills paid each month as we struggle with this terrible economy.

This week we've received the first of those donations, a $5,336.70 contribution from Whole Foods Market, which was the result of the bag recycling program run at five Chicago stores from April through June 2009. Every time a customer brought in their own bag for groceries, they could designate a 10-cent donation to Cabrini Connections! Thank you Whole Foods Market and your customers!

We've also continued to receive donations from veteran volunteers. Gita Rao, who was administrative coordinator from 1999 through 2001 send a donation of $300 from her father with a note saying, "My parents are in the U.S. for the summer and wanted to send something to Cabrini Connections before they headed off to Bangalore."

We've also received donations this week from:

Rachel Dziallo, former volunteer who has just moved to Austin, Texas
Lan Eng and Dan Bassill made donations via Facebook Causes

These donations are greatly appreciated and much needed. Please help us find our next $5000 donation. Help us find donations from friends, family, former students and from veteran volunteers.

Thank you Whole Foods Market!

Not much sleep if you lead a small non profit

It's Monday morning, and last night was a bit rough. Payroll is due Thursday, and we have just received a new bill for General Liability insurance. I woke up at about 4am and spent the next two hours worrying about where the money would come from.

Fortunately my mail contained a July 16 Golf Benefit Birdie Sponsorship payment of $1500 from Carol and Bruce Ebel, along with a dinner donation from them as well. Carol is a member of our Board of Directors, and president of a small manufacturing firm, Janler, Inc. She's also the current president of the Tooling & Manufacturing Association. Thus, she has her hands full with work and professional responsibilities, but still makes time to help find the dollars it takes for Cabrini Connections.

We also received $250 from US Bank, as a sponsor donation from their branch at 745 N. Milwaukee Ave, for the May 28 and 29 Tutor/Mentor Leadership and Networking Conference.

And Mark Fragassi sent in his check to be a player in the July 16 Golf Benefit.

It all adds up, and we're covered for this week's expenses.

Yet, we have these expenses every month. We've had them every month since we started Cabrini Connections, Tutor/Mentor Connection in 1993.

Our commitment to the 7th graders who join us is that we're going to do everything we can to help them stay in school, get a high school degree, then continue to the next level, so that by age 25 they are starting a job and career. The only limits to what we achieve are what our volunteers and donors are willing to do to help us.

In many ways this is like parenting. The kids don't always make steady progress toward these goals. Parents don't kick kids out when they are not doing well in school, or get in trouble with social issues. They find a way to pay their family expenses and continue to try to help their kids.



Cabrini Connections has the same challenge, each week we not only need to find a way to keep kids and volunteers together, and support their interactions, but we also need to find donors who will make large and small contributions to help us pay the fixed expenses.

This chart illustrates that nearly 30% of the cost of Cabrini Connections is rent, utilities, general liability insurance and other fixed expenses. Of the remaining 70% payroll is the major cost. Without generating regular revenue to cover these expenses, week to week, month to month, and year to year, we cannot stay connected to our kids, and we can't keep our commitments to them.

Thus, the work our volunteers (tutors, mentors, board, advisory council, friends) do to help find donations, is critically important.

Yet, in this economy, it has never been more difficult.



Chris Warren has been writing some articles about cause related marketing, and I encourage you to read these. We recruit volunteers who already hold jobs in various industries because they can model a wider range of career opportunities than our normally held by parents and neighbors in high poverty areas.

Furthermore, as volunteers bond with kids and understand the strategy, we believe they can educate their companies, and industries, in cause marketing and other strategies that support all tutor/mentor programs in the Chicago region, not just Cabrini Connections.

We're not there yet. But the work we've done with the Lawyers Lend A Hand Program at the Chicago Bar Association since 1994 illustrates that a group within a business sector can form, and take on a role of raising revenue and recruiting volunteers for tutor/mentor programs in many locations.

If we can create leadership in other industries who take on this same role, we can generate operating revenue from many sources, and not loose so much sleep every night worrying about paying the bills.

It's hard enough keeping the kids and volunteers involved.

Cause Marketing Part II (Sunday Funday)

Our Public Interest Program Fellow, Chris Warren just published the second post in a series about cause marketing at Cabrini Connections, The Tutor/Mentor Connection. Read it here and post your comments.

ReBAG, and Remind Your Friends!

Whole Foods Market has launched a bag recycling program and during April, May and June, the charity that benefits from customer recycling at five Chicago stores is CABRINI CONNECTIONS.

Bring your bags back when you shop, and you can have 10 cents per bag donated to support our work. Now I've told everyone for years that I would stand on my head, or do anything else, to help find the money needed to assure that Cabrini Connections can continue to connect kids and volunteers.

With this recycling program, you don't need to do that. You just need to tell your friends and co-workers to shop at Whole Foods and ReBag for Cabrini Connections.

This is not only a way to raise some money. It's a way to build a whole network of new supporters for tutoring/mentoring. I was in the Whole Foods store on Canal Street last week. I had some great wings and took home some fresh flowers. It's a huge store! Hundreds of shoppers are going to the cash register and what do they see? The Cabrini Connections, Tutor/Mentor Connection logo.

That's the type of corporate advertising we hope will be duplicated by many companies. Every time someone looks at this we hope they are reminded to go on Google and look up "tutor mentor". When they do, they will find our web sites, and they will find Cabrini Connections.

However, they will also find our new Interactive Program Locator, which will enable customers from each of these stores to shop for what tutor/mentor program in the North, West, or South parts of Chicago they want to support with their time, or dollars.

If you can enlist your faith group, your fraternity, your company, or your sports team to find a way to raise money for Cabrini Connections or other tutor/mentor programs, and point to the Program Locator, each event will complement each other event. In total we'll raise much more attention, and recruit many more volunteers and donors, than we can with each program just promoting their own efforts.

I hope you'll make an extra effort to do this, just as I'm doing. Together we can make sure kids at Cabrini Connections, and kids in other neighborhoods, have tutor/mentor programs as we go into the 2009-10 school year.

Show your Face, Book a Cause.

I spent hours out of my weekend training my Causes recruits on how to do more within the Cabrini Connections Causes page. I have challenged our members, now at an impressive 163 total to help us reach a fundraising goal of $2,500. To do this, we would need each member to donate, recruit donations and get the word out in general.

Below is the verbatim message one of my recruits sent out to the four people she recruited. I have removed names so it is easy for you to send to YOUR recruits.

Hey (insert friend's personal name)!

Thanks sooo much for joining the Cabrini Connections cause to help Chicago at-risk youth. Right now, the Cause has a fundraising goal and is asking each of us to donate at least $15. If we raise at least $2,500 a company is going to match us! This would be a $5,000 donation to help the program mentor more than 75 at-risk youth. Can you please join me in being one of the first few to get this goal underway?

Thanks again for joining and please visit the cause from time to time to see what they are doing in the community.

Thanks!

(insert your name here)

We, the staff need to make sure we contribute more than just recruits to the Cause. We do this day in and day out, recruitment of eyes to our program. We need to show the public, our Facebook friends, and our recruits that we don't only work here but actually support it as well. I sent a note to 60 of my most promising friends asking them to contribute. With that note it touched on how Cassina has donated $10 to the Cabrini Connections cause. Can you help too? If all of them at LEAST match my meager donation, that's $600 toward our fundraising goals. The staff has to be the example. It is because of this, I am asking each full-time and part-time staff member to donate at least $25 total to the cause by January 8, 2009. If I were recruited to a Cause by someone who had not donated to it, it would make me leery to give my own money. We must show we are just as committed. We don't just WORK here, but we support and believe in it.

To use our Program Coordinator's store analogy: we, as investors, have to put money into the store if we want it to make money. Other investors look at what's been done in house, first, before they decide to take a chance. If you are a staff member, a volunteer, or even a student of Cabrini Connections, Tutor/Mentor Connection and should you need help reaching out to your recruits, friends who are not apart of the cause or convincing people to join Facebook to give back, let me know. I can help you with that.

Show your face! Give to the cause.
facebookers, visit and join our Causes page.
Need a facebook page? Go here.