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Mike Trakan, GIS/Mapping Coordinator
Mike Trakan has worked as GIS/Mapping Coordinator for Tutor/Mentor Connection (TM/C) since January, 2008.
He grew up in Chicago’s Western suburbs and attended Waubonsie Valley High School in Aurora. He completed his undergraduate work at the University of Wisconsin – Madison, where he developed an interest in social justice and earned a B.A. International Relations/French in 1994. After Madison, he changed hats several times before falling into a late 1990s IT career in Chicago. Over the past ten years, he has worked as web developer, software programmer, and database programmer at various companies in the Chicago area.
In 2005, behind the walls of a cubicle, buried deep in the belly of a big downtown insurance monster, he decided it was time to re-explore his social justice roots. Feeling it was wrong somehow to be offering his talents to billionaires when his skills could serve and help people, he enrolled in a graduate level Teaching program at DePaul University in 2005. To make ends meet, he took a tutor position for two years at Al Raby High School in East Garfield Park, a notorious high-poverty neighborhood on Chicago’s West side. Mike completed his student teaching at Raby and received his Teaching Certificate in June 2008. He will finish his MA-Education in summer 2009.
While at Raby, Mike quickly recognized that GIS (Geographic Information Systems) maps offered a perfect marriage of his advocacy and teaching ambitions, with his technology background. He was fortunate to witness students at Raby producing maps in a GIS lab (ARHS is one of the few, if not only, high school programs in Chicago with a GIS curriculum), and was impressed with how the technology afforded students opportunities to obtain real job skills while responsibly advocating for social, political, and economic change. As it turned out, DePaul had a GIS certification program. He eagerly took GIS courses alongside his teaching curriculum.
Mike finished a GIS internship in September 2007 with the Center for Urban Environmental Research and Policy (CUERP) at Loyola University and was introduced by his Loyola network to Dan Bassill and Tutor/Mentor Connection in January 2008. It seemed almost too good to be true. Mike was already tutoring underserved kids on the West side, and Dan needed a GIS tech to assist tutoring and mentoring everywhere.
At T/MC, Mike creates maps that look at the relationship among poverty, community resources, school performance, and locations of non-school tutoring/mentoring facilities for K-12 students. The maps help community, business, and political leadership visualize these relationships when working toward strategies and partnerships that offer much-needed support for these non-profit programs. The maps are also made available to journalists or anyone who wishes to include "tutoring and mentoring" in published discussions of social problems (crime, poverty, failing schools, etc.) and the search for comprehensive solutions.
The maps are regularly featured in published discussions, including his blog http://mappingforjustice.blogspot.com/
Mike Trakan is currently funded, through grants, to remain on staff though 2009. |
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