Giving Compass' Take:

• You Can't Be What You Can't See by Mibrey W. McLaughlin tells the story about how CYCLE, an out-of-school-time tutoring program started in 1978 in Chicago, addressed the opportunity gap for young people living in poverty. 

• One of the main reasons the program was successful was CYCLE's youth-centered, relationship-based model. How can other organizations that want to address youth poverty and opportunity gaps execute similar models? What makes it successful for this demographic? 

• Read about the opportunity gaps in the education system due to networks.

Concrete, practicable solutions to society's urgent challenges are rare, in part because the debate around such issues too often is driven by philosophical differences and partisan political calculation.

What is needed instead are compelling stories that explain those challenges through the eyes of the people affected and suggest possible solutions based on their lived reality. You Cant Be What You Can't See, by Milbrey W. McLaughlin, tells one such story

In the book, McLaughlin, the David Jack Professor Emeritus of Education and Public Policy at Stanford University and founding director of the John W. Gardner Center for Youth and Their Communities, documents what happened to more than seven hundred young people from Chicago's Cabrini-Green public housing project who participated in CYCLE, an out-of-school-time tutoring program started in 1978 in the basement of Cabrini-Green's LaSalle Street Church.

Over the next decade and a half the program evolved into a comprehensive afterschool and summer support program for neighborhood youth, the history of which McLaughlin traces through the lives of the young people who participated. Along the way, we learn, through the kids' own voices, how the program altered the trajectory of their lives for the better.

McLaughlin closes the book with three takeaways for those working to replicate and scale CYCLE's successes over a generation: lack of opportunities keeps poor youth stuck in place; addressing the opportunity gap for impoverished youth requires attending to both the cultural and structural elements of poverty; and a youth-centered, relationship-based program should be a key element in any such effort.

Read the full article about CYCLE by Mitch Nauffts at PhilanTopic