Ninth Annual Barristers Big Band Benefit Ball

Jim Tyree, Honoree
Mesirow Financial and Sun-Times Media

Saturday, March 13, 2010

Make a Year-End Donation to Support Mentoring!

Please consider including Lawyers Lend-A-Hand to Youth in your end of the year charitable donations. All donations go to support local tutor/mentor programs serving disadvantaged youth. Make your donation today!

Call to Action

Members of the legal profession are uniquely situated to make a profound impact in young people’s lives to enable them to reach their full potential and provide them with the tools to avoid the criminal justice system.

Kids growing up in urban poverty today are literally starved for mentors. Study after study shows that children raised in today’s inner cities increasingly cannot turn to their parents, teachers, or neighbors for the kind of guidance needed to escape poverty. Instead, these kids get involved in gangs and become lost in our justice system.

In pockets throughout the City of Chicago, there are rays of hope for impoverished kids: tutor/mentor programs that focus not simply on homework but on building one-on-one relationships between children and adults that will help end the cycle of poverty. These programs give impoverished children the opportunity to escape from their daily existences, to share their hopes and fears with an adult in a supportive environment, and to dream of one day achieving personal and professional success. The Sun Times Judge Marovitz Lawyers Lend-A-Hand To Youth Program (Lawyers Lend-A-Hand to Youth) is our legal community’s effort to contribute to outstanding youth mentoring programs in Chicago.

I invite you to join us in this noble effort in whatever way you can. Together, we can lift a spirit and lend-a-hand.

Jim Morsch
Chair, Governing Board

How Can You Help?

• Volunteer your time as a mentor or board member of a tutor/mentor agency
  
  
• Get your law firm, corporation, client, or vendor to adopt a tutor/mentor agency
  
  
• Fund a $5000 grant to be made in your name or your firm's name
  
  
• Participate in the Tickets-for-Kids Program by donating your unused tickets and sky boxes for cultural and sporting events
  
  
• Make a personal contribution right now by credit card or check
  

Inspired Youth, a northside tutoring/mentoring program, was recognized Wednesday, January 27, by Lawyers Lend-A-Hand to Youth  for its work on behalf of children in the Edgewater and Uptown neighborhoods.  Inspired Youth was honored with the Much Shelist Founders Award, a $7,000 award donated by the law firm Much Shelist Denenberg Ament & Rubenstein, P.C.

Governor Pat Quinn appointed Genita C. Robinson, Lend-A-Hand's executive director, to the Serve Illinois Commission. The Commission enhances and supports community volunteerism and administers the AmeriCorps state program in Illinois.