TechSoup - Help for Nonprofits

This may be old news, but explore this website for your own use--how-tos, webinars, reduced prices, and so much more. Tech Soup is available to 501 (c) (3) nonprofits. Agencies can register online and will be able to qualify for certain products based on their mission and services. Our foundation was able to get access to GoToMeeting at a reduced cost through this site. 

http://www.techsoup.org/

To join http://www.techsoup.org/joining-techsoup

Ret. 12-9-14

Changing the Conversation - Engineer Inside You?

Fortuitously at the recent Oklahoma Women in STEM Mentoring Kickoff in Tulsa, we met Barbara Wollmershauser among others. She is a passionate font of knowledge and connector of people and ideas. Thanks to Barbara!

 

Changing the Conversation strives to encourage more compelling, effective communication to the public about engineering and engineers. The National Engineers Week Foundation has joined forces with the National Academy of Engineering on this national campaign that offers research-based messaging, resources, and simple steps that you can take right away. By changing how we present engineering, we can encourage young people to make a difference in the world through an engineering career. - See more at: http://www.nspe.org/resources/partners-and-state-societies/national-engineers-week#sthash.AfQIz5Bi.dpuf

3)  The Is the Engineer Inside You? by Celeste Baine is also available free as a PDF download.  See the home page link below.

Fifteen years ago, while a biomedical engineering student at Louisiana Tech University, Celeste Baine wrote the First Edition of Is There an Engineer Inside You?: A Comprehensive Guide to Career Decisions in Engineering. It was the book that she wished she'd had when she wanted to go to engineering school.

The new Fourth Edition covers 38 different types of engineering and engineering technology, how to succeed in engineering school, women and minorities in engineering, engineering careers that make you say "wow!", salary information and much more. This book has been the #1 engineering career book at Amazon and a high-ranking career guide for over a decade.  It was recently positively peer-reviewed by over 50 engineering and engineering technology professors and is the most comprehensive book on engineering careers in the marketplace.

Across the nation, 30-40 percent of students drop out of engineering each year. Is There an Engineer Inside You? can help. Find out what engineering is all about before you start college.

Why is Award Winning Author Celeste Baine Doing This Book Give Away?

“I am completely committed to making a difference in the world. I think about it before I fall asleep and it gets me out of bed every morning. Engineering school is the best thing I ever did for myself. It enabled me to feel like I leap tall buildings in a single bound, run faster than a steaming locomotive, and have the ability to solve any problem that comes my way.  I do what I do because I think an engineering education can take you anywhere you want to go. It’s a great launching pad for the rest of your life because it will help you in everything that you do and want to do.”  Celeste Baine.

For Your Free Copy go to http://tulsaengineer.org/societies/swe/

Barbara Wollmershauser, P.E.

Tulsa Engineering Foundation Board Member
Tulsa Regional STEM Alliance volunteer

Personal communication, 11-11-14 

Black Girls Code

While searching for organizations that promote learning to code, we found this, too. 'Another inspiration.

http://www.blackgirlscode.com/  

Vision: To increase the number of women of color in the digital space by empowering girls of color 7 to 17 to become innovators in STEM fields, leaders in their communities, and builders of their own futures through exposure to computer science and technology.

Note: This website states that Black Boys Code is coming soon.

Ret. 12-6-14

Girls Who Code Opportunities

Check out this website for so many opportunities and even more inspiration! We heard about this through Susan Wojcicki, CEO, YouTube. More on her later.

http://girlswhocode.com/

 Women represent 12% of all computer science graduates. 

In 1984, they represented 37% of all computer science graduates. 

 "We have a crush on Girls Who Code!" - GLAMOUR Magazine

WHO WE ARE

Launched in Spring 2012, Girls Who code is a national nonprofit organization working to close the gender gap in the technology and engineering sectors. With support from public and private partners, Girls Who Code works to education, inspire, and equip high school girls with the skills and resources to pursue opportunities in computing fields.


Even after 2015, you will find updated opportunities here. 

Ret. 12-6-14

Foster Alumni & the Holidays

OSU's Dr. Kerri Kearney shared this with the R is for Thursday network. Read it, and think what you can do in your community.

When There's No Going Home

Susan Kools, RN, PhD, FAAN
The University of Virginia School of Nursing's Madge M. Jones Professor and Director of Diversity, Inclusion and Excellence.
Posted: 11/17/2014 10:51 am EST  Updated: 11/17/2014 10:59 am EST



It's that time of year when many young people head back into the comforting orbit of their parents' home -- home for the holidays, home from college, home from work, back into old rooms, clean laundry and the protection of family, food and familiarity.

But for some young people, there is no going home, not ever. For them, the place just doesn't exist.

And their ranks increase every year, when some 23,000 foster children become too old for our social services system at age 18 without ever having found a secure place to call home.

What happens to this group -- nearly a quarter million individuals over the past decade alone - should concern the lot of us. These are children that we as a society have decided can have a better chance away from their family of origin, but the fact is when they don't have meaningful and sustained social connections during their adolescent years, things don't go well as they emerge into adulthood.
Everyone should know and care about this, because like it or not, we all pay for it. And there are incredible and disquieting costs -- social, financial and human -- as a result.

A Midwest study found that of 600 young adults who'd aged out of the foster care and child welfare system, less than half were employed by age 24 with an annual income of just $8,000. More than a quarter had been homeless. Twenty-five percent had no high school diploma and just six percent had earned either a two- or four-year degree -- educational attainment thought to be the entry ticket for a decent-paying job and a chance at a financially stable life. The majority of these young women and men had already had children and received needs-based government assistance. Forty-two percent of the young men had been arrested and 23 percent had been convicted of a crime.

The costs of aging out of foster care drain our collective, taxpayer-funded coffers, too. The Jim Casey Youth Opportunities Initiative found that taxpayers and communities pay roughly $300,000 for the public assistance, incarceration and lost wages for each young person who ages out of the foster care system. That's close to $7 billion spent every year on this group of vulnerable adolescents in the U.S.
With National Adoption Day soon to arrive, we'll hear a lot about American families that generously open their hearts and doors to children in need, as well as heart rending statistics about how many more children are still waiting for a permanent home. But behind the gleam of adoption lies a darker truth about its sister social program, foster care, and the often debilitating results of children who -- most often plucked from their biological families for a host of good reasons -- never find a place to call home, the right kind of support, or a level of stability and constancy and end up 18, on their own, and entirely lost right at the moment when they're supposed to be finding themselves.

These are young people who are bright and open and determined but wholly unprepared for life in ways that the average, family-fortified youth cannot fathom. Without connection to one or two -- or more -- consistent, positive, connected adult role models in their communities, these adolescents will continue to flounder.

It's high time that we understand the lost human capital of this group and be proactive in our approach to to usher them into adulthood -- really, just another three to five years -- the right way.

That means fostering meaningful social connections with supportive adults, facilitating their educational attainment and job training, and providing transitional housing, health and mental health care.

Of course having a family matters. It shapes the raw, malleable stuff in us that lies between our genetic material and our circumstances. But where one's family comes from, and who can comprise it, is truly open and diverse. If we rally to support children aging out of foster care with the kinds of support they need, they will flourish as those with permanent and stable families have had the opportunity to do.

The great Nelson Mandela asserted that "there can be no keener revelation of a society's soul than the way in which it treats its children." In our celebration of National Adoption Day, let us not forget society's children -- our children -- those who grow up in foster care.

Susan Kools is the Madge M. Jones Professor of Nursing at the University of Virginia School of Nursing. A long-time advocate of adolescents, she has studied the health and development of adolescents in foster care, and aims to improve the outcomes of young people aging out of foster care.
Follow Susan Kools, RN, PhD, FAAN on Twitter: www.twitter.com/uvason

Mentoring in Rural Areas

In Oklahoma, we have no problem with creative and successful mentoring in rural areas; however, readers might be interested in this Q&A found in The Chronicle of Evidence-based Mentoring.

For young men in particular physical and learning activities combined, especially in sports and/or manly crafts, are beneficial. Yesterday, in fact, we heard about and are researching a fishing mentoring program that could be done in rural, suburban, or urban areas. Some of Fairview's mentors and mentees train and run in a local marathon in addition to hunting and fishing. Oklahoma really does have "mentoring" going on! Share your activities with us.

FORUM: Does mentoring work in rural areas?

by Mike Garringer

In my time as a technical assistance provider in the youth mentoring field, some of the most difficult and persistent challenges I’ve seen are those faced by rural mentoring programs. While running a high-quality program is difficult in any town or urban environment, the challenges faced by rural programs are considerable: geographic distance between program participants, a dearth of easy-to-do activities, a small fundraising and volunteer base. And in the smallest of small towns, such as those in the area of Iowa where I’m from, you also get a healthy dose of “every knows everyone’s business” issues that can make building trusting, confidential mentoring relationships difficult.

So can youth mentoring really work in rural environments? What challenges do these programs face and how do they overcome them? And is it possible that rural programs actually have some advantages over their urban counterparts?

To answer these questions, I’ve asked a panel of leading experts on running programs in rural areas to weigh in on the promise and hurdles of offering mentoring in rural areas.

Kathryn Eustis – Director, Youth Development and Prevention Programs, Calaveras (CA) County Office of Education

Not only does mentoring work in rural areas, I believe that mentoring has the potential to be even more influential for youth in rural areas than in urban areas. There may be greater challenges in building and sustaining a mentoring program, but mentoring itself can be extremely powerful in a small community. 

In the first place, isolation for vulnerable rural youth is literal, not figurative.  Our kids often livemiles away from their neighbors and are literally stuck at home, often with nothing to do but watch TV and play video games.  The opportunity to hang out with a safe, fun adult has also meant the first time ever going to a restaurant or movie theater; the first time hiking, fishing, or exploring in their own community; or the first time visiting a home that is quiet, clean and safe.  For youth who haven’t been exposed to extreme violence or drugs, simply reducing their physical isolation and letting them know they are valued can have an enormous impact.  They are like thirsty plants, because their self-esteem and social skills increase incredibly quickly. 

Another powerful way in which mentoring works in rural areas is the potential of each mentor-mentee relationship to affect the entire community. In a rural environment, socio-economic differences manifest in cultural—and geographic—gulfs in the community.  It is very easy for more comfortable, affluent community members to avoid acknowledging the challenges faced by other community members and to judge the kids from the “bad” families.  Mentors act as bridges across those gulfs, allaying fears of the Other on both sides while they build relationships that weave the entire community closer together. The fact that many people know each other in a small community is an asset once the process gains momentum; adults begin role modeling compassion among their peers just as much as they do for their mentees, and opportunities open up for youth who would never have had them.

Karen Shaver – Vice-President, Agency Services, Big Brothers Big Sisters of Canada

In Canada, Big Brothers Big Sisters is an established organization with 100 years of experience behind it.  Our name conveys credibility, legitimacy and quality to families across the country which results in numerous requests for service from communities, urban and rural and remote.

Our organizational approach – the establishment of an independent agency requiring a Board of Directors, a charitable number, etc. – is an effective model in urban centres.  However, Canada has many rural and remote areas that may not be best served by that organizational structure and where our formal mentoring programs may not be a fit.  Picture Flying Dust First Nation, a Cree community of about 800 people, in a fairly isolated part of Saskatchewan.  Or Carcross, Yukon Territory, a primarily First Nations community, of less than 300 people, with one road in.  Or the many fly-in communities, or ice-road only access communities, that dot the far, and not so far, North.  It just isn’t reasonable for Big Brothers Big Sisters to assume that our model of structure and service delivery will be effective or feasible.

But that doesn’t mean that mentoring won’t work.  In fact, informal mentoring has worked in these communities for centuries.  It’s when we try to impose our structure, our Standards, our beliefs of what is right and our urban model of mentoring that we concoct our own challenges.  By listening to the strategies that have been effectively employed, by understanding the strengths and resources that already exist in rural and remote areas and by truly understanding and applying the core components of the elements of effective mentoring relationships and programs, we can work alongside community members to tailor mentoring relationships and programs that can work well.

Dr. Susan Weinberger – Founder and President of the Mentor Consulting Group

Unquestionably, in rural communities, recruiting mentors for youth is a challenge. Distance is a factor. How do you spend an hour a week with your mentee when you might have to travel an equal amount of time just to get to the session? Let’s look at the positives. It takes a whole village to mentor a child. In my experience, I think it is actually an advantage to mentor in rural areas because often the community wants to help their own within a five mile radius of where they live. There is a built in community bond there that is often missing in urban programs.

A few years ago, I designed a program in Port Aransas, TX. Most get to this fishing village by boat. Soon after I arrived, the folks wanting to begin the program said, “Who will we get as the mentors? We have no other industry here. Not even a bank…”  Well, we used the village as our base. We recruited the local fishermen — who became mentors for the youth — and many of the mentees became interested in becoming fishermen and wanted to learn the trade.  A career-based mentoring program developed before our eyes. We also recruited the only doctor, postman, fireman, and policeman, all of whom became mentors.

However, there are many rural areas where there is a challenge to match mentors and mentees.  In my work in Indian country, many of the reservations have youth that live a long distance from the interested and prospective mentors.  The solution for them has become  e-mentoring – three weeks a month with supervised, software-based computer generated discussions, and in-person meetings once a month.

Another way to approach this in rural America is seen in the work of organizations like the local Boys & Girls Clubs where youth thrive in a safe haven after school.  The schedule for meetings is much more flexible.  The mentors meet the mentees after work, often between 3 – 7 p.m., before the Club closes. This flexibility of meeting times can alleviate some of the scheduling issues that challenge rural programs.

Rural America needs to become creative in terms of finding mentors.  These programs may not always look like their more traditional urban counterparts, but the outcome can be incredible for mentors and mentees.

http://chronicle.umbmentoring.org/forum-does-mentoring-work-in-rural-areas/ 

Ret. 12-2-14

The Need for Mentoring Program Evaluation

In the effort to justify that we have a results-producing mentoring program, we sometimes rely on anecdotes and beliefs. Hard data, sometimes even longitudinal data, is essential for improving programs, recruiting mentors, and securing funding. Note how Carol Travis and Elliot Aronson  gently shake us back into reality. Thanks to Jean Rhodes, Ph.D., for sharing in The Chronicle of Evidence-based Mentoring.

The problem of the benevolent dolphin: Implications for mentoring

 by Jean Rhodes

In their new book, “Mistakes Were Made, But Not by Me,” Carol Travis and Elliot Aronson discuss our how confirmatory biasespredispose us toward evidence that confirms perceptions that we already have. And, in the absence of rigorous, experimental studies, we can easily summon up “evidence” that supports our viewpoints while ignoring evidence that contradicts our beliefs. This has relevance for mentoring programs. If we take as a given that “mentoring works,” and don’t evaluate our efforts, we can easily find evidence to confirm this presumption. To illustrate this point, Travis and Elliot describe the “Problem of the Benevolent Dolphin” notes how, every once in a while, a new story appears about a shipwrecked sailor or swimmer who, on the verge of drowning, is nudged to safety by a dolphin. As they explain:

“It is tempting to conclude that dolphins must really like human beings, enough to save us from drowning. But wait—are dolphins aware that humans don’t swim as well as they do? Are they actually intending to be helpful? To answer that question, we would need to know how many shipwrecked sailors have been gently nudged further out to sea by dolphins, there to drown and never be heard from again. We don’t know about those cases because the swimmers don’t live to tell us about their evil-dolphin experiences. If we had that information, we might that dolphins are neither benevolent nor evil; they are just being playful.”

The authors then take a hard look at psychotherapists, who, in the absence of rigorous, experimental studies, can easily summon up “evidence” that their clients are improving and that their approaches are working. In much the same way, the field of mentoring can, in the absence of data, fall prey to the flawed reasoning of the benevolent dolphin problem.  Not that there are  evil-mentor experiences out there, but we need to hold open the possibility that some of our efforts, especially the more perfunctory approaches to relationships, at best, neutral. We don’t hear about these efforts because youth in matches that don’t click or fall apart prematurely fade quietly from programs, and the failed relationships that they represent are overshadowed by the more compelling success stories of their peers. Indeed, programs often demonstrate their success to funders not by providing decks of slides with evaluation results but by showcasing successful matches and the heartwarming stories they represent. Since youth whose mentors didn’t deliver on their promises typically blame themselves when relationships fail, the shortcomings of programs and the volunteers they recruit go largely unnoticed.

We believe that a close caring relationship improves the lives of youth. But for our theories of change to be scientific they must be stated in ways that it can be shown to be false as well as true. For beliefs to be a matter of science, and not just faith, we need to subject them to the scrutiny of rigorous evaluation. Otherwise, we are no better than the shipwrecked sailors who, having made it to shore, tell us a compelling story that confirm our implicit biases.

http://chronicle.umbmentoring.org/the-problem-of-the-benevolent-dolphin-implications-for-mentoring/ 

Ret. 12-2-14