Read student and volunteer profiles

I hope that as you visit this blog, you'll also visit the blogs listed on the right side of these pages. They are written by other staff and volunteers and expand the perspectives of what Cabrini Connections is trying to do and who is involved.

In particular, I encourage you to read the student and volunteer profiles that Chris Warren is writing each week, as well as his discussion of student participation and leadership.

If you read Nicole's blog you'll learn more about the Tutor/Mentor Connection part of this organization, and how what we do here is an example for programs all over the country!

Finally, if you read blogs by Cassina and Dan you'll learn about fund raising and about actions leaders can take to help programs like Cabrini Connections serve kids in Cabrini Green and other high poverty neighborhoods.

These change every week, so check in often.

Westwood College Visit

Recently, as part of the Cabrini Connections College Prep Program, we took a number of students to visit Westwood College, meeting with various administrators, students, professors and even the University President. This was the 2nd of many College visits that we will be organizing this year. The next is this coming Friday, Nov 7th, where we will be taking students to visit Chicago State University and The Illinois Institute of Technology. During our College visit series we are trying to expose students to the wide variety of schools in the Chicagoland area, everything from 2 year community colleges to elite schools such as Northwestern and The University of Chicago. The idea is to expose not only our Juniors and Seniors to various schools but also our underclassmen, so that they might be better able to visualize themselves at College in a few years and have something to strive for during their High School years.

At Westwood College the kids attended an admissions presentation geared towards urban youth that emphasized the affordability of Westwood and how it's focus on developing skills for particular careers, such as criminal justice, computer animation or design, ensures that graduates are well prepared for the working world and in most cases, already have a well-paying job lined up before they graduate. The University president joined us for the latter half of the presentation and spoke with the kids for a bit, which left an impression on them. Upon finding out that one of our students, Sean Mayfield, has a passion for animation he took us to a couple classrooms where animation classes were in session and encouraged us to sit in. After class we grabbed some pizza with the professor while she showed off some of her department's animation work, which was really impressive. After lunch we toured the rest of the campus, met up with one of our tutors, Stephanie, a senior at Westwood, who gave us the inside scoop on student life at Westwood and introduced us to some more faculty. All in all we had an exceptional time at Westwood and I think that some of our kids will definitely be giving the school serious consideration. Stay tuned for more updates from our future college visits.

New Video tells Cabrini Connections' Story

Here's a link to a video posted on YouTube that was done by a Northwestern University graduate student this fall. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dW2cLuegKlE

Please pass this on to other viewers through your Facebook, My Space and LinkedIn networks so more people learn about our work and give us their support.

If you know of people working with media, video, communications, etc. who would want to create videos like this, and teach kids to do this, we're looking for volunteers to help re-launch our video group. Contact Dan or El Da'Sheon if you know of interested people.