SNA Analysis of Tutor/Mentor Conference May 2008

Tutor/Mentor Connection organizes biannual Tutor/Mentor Networking and Leadership Conferences for the improvement of quality and availability of tutor/mentor programs in the high poverty areas of Chicago. The main goal of these conferences are to establish connection between the people leading tutor/mentor programs, the people who are volunteers, and the people who provide the money so that high quality tutor/mentor programs can reach to the youth of  high poverty neighborhood.

Every year many organizations participate in these conferences to support the tutor/mentor programs. Leaders of different tutor/mentor programs in Chicago volunteer to present workshops and sit on panels. 

Presented below is a conference map of May 08 Tutor/Mentor conference created by InFlow Social Network Analysis software.

The map provides a geographical distribution of organizations that attended the May 08 conference. It shows different local and regional organizations that participated in the conference. There were about 86 organizations present at the conference, out of which 59 are local organizations and rests are regional organizations. All these organizations work together with a common aim to help youth from high poverty areas to connect with tutors after school hours. The organization names are numbered for the clarity of the map.

The above two maps are divided into two (local organizations and regional organizations) to show a list of organizations that attended the conference. Here we can see that T/MC is connected to more local organizations compared to the regional organizations through the conference.

The above map shows different local organizations connected to T/MC, out of these organizations there are some organizations that provide tutor/mentor programs and there are other organizations which indirectly contribute to tutor/mentor programs by attending conferences, giving presentations, contributing in panel discussions and providing funds. The local organizations, which presented in the conference, are highlighted in pink.

Finally, the above map provides the same analysis described in the previous section for the regional organizations that attended the conference. But here we have also highlighted a donor in green. Karina Ayala-Bermejo, Executive Director, SunTimes Judge Marovitz, Lawyers Lend-A-Hand to Youth Program,  (http://www.lawyerslendahand.org) provided funding to T/MC and also was a speaker for the May 08 conference. It can be interpreted from the map that more donors are required to keep these programs running and improving the quality of tutor/mentor programs.

I am interested to create another version of this map showing the relationship between the organizations that attended the May 08 conference for that we have to create surveys for the people who attended the conference. We can judge the strength of the relationship between these organizations from the survey reports.  By creating this map we can show how different organizations get connected to each other through T/MC conferences. This will attract more leaders, volunteers and donors to the T/MC conference.