Tutor/Mentor Conference November 21st at the Field Museum!

It's official - The November 2008 Tutor/Mentor Leadership and Networking Conference has been scheduled at the Field Museum on Friday November 21st. I'm fortunate to be the friend of Julie Nygaard, who is the Assistant to the Director of Public Services at the Field Museum. She read my blog article a couple of weeks ago about how I was having difficulties finding a site for the conference. She thought that a partnership between the Field Museum and Cabrini Connections, Tutor/Mentor Connection would be very fruitful and ran with the idea of hosting the conference here. Without her initiative and vision the conference would not have been possible.

While we are still in the process of scheduling workshops and speakers, we are very excited about all the opportunities that hosting the conference at the Field Museum will afford us. An opportunity that we're especially excited about is the participation of the Museum's front-line staff. Since many of the staff lives in the neighborhoods that the tutoring and mentoring programs are serving, we thought it would be a wonderful thing for them to give a panel on what is going on in their neighborhoods and what their needs are as parents and community-members.

We're also very excited about the possibility of working with the Education Department at the Field Museum and hear how they plan to help at-risk youth succeed, especially in the sciences. There are simply so many wonderful possibilities that having this conference at the Field Museum affords and I look forward to telling you more about it as it comes together.