Tag: Chicago

This User-Friendly Tool Gets You In The Know Before You Vote

Posted on by robbie

With the presidential primary election looming, Chicago public school teacher Megan Augustiny introduced her high school civics students to BallotReady, an online guide to down-ballot races. (Think: state attorney, judgeships, city council — candidates that first-time voters in her class had never heard of, but would soon be electing to office). The nonpartisan site compiles essential information that voters need on little-known candidates — their job experience, positions on controversial issues and endorsements accrued — making it easy for students (and all voters) to “access information in the way they are used to,” she says, favoriting contenders as if their sample ballot were an Instagram feed.
Which is just what Alex Niemczewski and Aviva Rosman, two recent University of Chicago grads who co-founded BallotReady, had envisioned. Both are reserved, heads-down types who prefer to focus on their work, speaking softly about their high-minded ideals of involving more people at all stages of the democratic process. The two built the site in their spare time and spent just $180 on marketing to launch BallotReady. Within a few months, it irreversibly changed voter behavior across Illinois, where thousands of people logged on to the site. During this year’s bombastic election season, instead of skipping many of the contests, or worse, casting an uninformed vote, BallotReady users now have at their fingertips valuable information about local and regional candidates that are virtually unknown to most people.
For a glimpse of BallotReady’s reach, all one needs to do is log on to Twitter on Election Day.


In states where it’s active, BallotReady is so popular that politicians ask to add specifics to their profiles, offering new possibilities for local campaigns that are too small to attract media coverage or buy their own advertisements. If a school board member sees her opponent vows to support a charter school expansion, for instance, the incumbent may add more details to her education platform. “If a candidate says, ‘I support education,’ we don’t include that, because everybody does,” Niemczewski says. Although, “if a candidate didn’t support education, we would include that,” she adds.
BallotReady emerged from a collision of two pasts: Rosman’s as an enthusiastic electioneer and Niemczewski’s nonprofit work, as well as her knack for code. A self-avowed political junkie, Rosman started participating in the political process in middle school, driving with her dad from their native Massachusetts to New Hampshire and attempting to sway the state’s swing voters every election. In 2004, she nearly failed two high school classes when she used frequent flier miles to campaign for John Kerry in Florida. Four years later, while staffing a congressional race in Illinois, Rosman realized her knowledge was severely lacking. “I was trying to inform people about my candidate, and yet, I was unprepared to vote for all these other people on the ballot,” she remembers. Then in 2014, Rosman ran for a seat on the school council in Chicago. She asked Niemczewski, an old classmate then coaching Chicago’s unemployed into IT jobs, to vote for her. “I didn’t even know there was an election,” Niemczewski says, admitting to missing the vote. The two stayed in touch and a few months later, collaborated on the guide that developed into BallotReady.
More than 160,000 voters in Illinois, Virginia, Kentucky and Colorado have used BallotReady to inform their choices — a 10-fold growth from its launch last fall. The site is expanding its reach, developing profiles for candidates in Maryland, New Hampshire and Florida. Scaling hasn’t been easy: “It takes a lot of phone calls and relationship-building. That’s kind of daunting,” Niemczewski says, noting that 100 volunteer curators are needed to build candidate profiles, “but it’s also exciting, because it means we can really help.” By year’s end, BallotReady hopes to reach 1 million voters, and by 2020, to be in every state.
Since BallotReady is committed to educating every American citizen, it devotes resources to eliminating digital access issues that arise. Once, Niemczewski responded to a request from an elderly woman in an assisted living center. After the woman reported being unable to load BallotReady, Niemczewski troubleshot the problem by backdating the site’s functionality, so the senior citizens could use it on their outdated computers.
Ultimately, BallotReady’s founders work to make their innovative site as user-friendly as possible — to both the older electorate and young, first-time voters alike. That mission is just one of the reasons why teachers like Augustiny thinks that its online repository of candidate profiles is a great way to get Millennials more involved in elections. “The Internet is so pervasive at this point: it informs everything that we do, especially for younger people. Not having that information readily accessible online was a real disservice to young people,” she says.

As a teacher, Augustiny always wants her kids to develop in-depth research skills. But when it comes to voting — an activity that’s made so many Americans apathetic — she’s in favor of turning to BallotReady for a digital shortcut.
This article is part of the What’s Possible series produced by NationSwell and Comcast NBCUniversal, which shines a light on changemakers who are creating opportunities to help people and communities thrive in a 21st-century world. These social entrepreneurs and their future forward ideas represent what’s possible when people come together to create solutions that connect, educate and empower others and move America forward.
MORE: Investing in the Future: This Visionary Program Gets Students Hooked on STEM

The Zero-Energy Way to Produce Food, How to Build Hope in a Poisoned City and More

Posted on by robbie

 
What’s Growing On at The Plant?, onEarth
On the southwest side of the Windy City, a former meatpacking plant is now the home of The Plant, an incubator of 16 food start-ups. Tenants work together in order to be as sustainable as possible — literally, one business’s trash is another’s storage container, recipe ingredient or energy source. The long-term plan for this urban agricultural experiment? Sprout numerous Plants across the nation.
Life as a Young Athlete in Flint, Michigan, Bleacher Report
In a city under siege by its poisoned public water system, hometown heroes are using basketball to raise awareness and kids’ spirits. Kenyada Dent, a guidance counselor and high school hoops coach, uses the game as a tool to motivate his players towards opportunities outside of the struggling city; another coach, Chris McLavish, organized a charity game featuring former collegiate and NBA players that grew up in Flint. The activity on the court doesn’t make the tap water drinkable or erase the damage already inflicted, but it does bring much-needed joy to a city overcome with despair.
Truancy, Suspension Rates Drop in Greater Los Angeles Area Schools, The Chronicle of Social Change
A suspension doesn’t just make a child miss out on a day of learning, it also increases the likelihood that he’ll go to prison. Because of this, many school districts in the Golden State now implement restorative justice practices — a strategy that uses reconciliation with victims as a means of rehabilitation — instead of traditional, punitive disciplinary measures. Suspension rates and truancy filings have decreased, but racial discrepancies still exist when analyzing discipline statistics.
MORE: Suspending Students Isn’t Effective. Here’s What Schools Should Do Instead

Why One Step Backwards Can Be Necessary for Progress to Occur

Posted on by robbie

Shaiza Rizavi sees the world — American culture, politics and economics — from an outsider’s perspective. Raised in Karachi, the largest city in Pakistan, her family moved to Illinois when she was a girl. Rizavi now works as a partner at Gilder, Gagnon, Howe & Co., a growth equity brokerage firm where she seeks out companies with “disruptive, innovative approaches.” She also serves on the board of Acumen, which invests in strategies to end world poverty. NationSwell met up with her at a cafe in Midtown Manhattan, near the southern edge of Central Park.
What’s the best advice you have ever been given on leadership?
I think it’s important to be able to give yourself permission to take a lot of risk and make mistakes as you go along. I learn that in my business constantly. There’s a lot of risk-taking in the stocks that I invest in and pain that goes along with that. It’s a teeter-totter that’s only in balance for a nanosecond — or not at all. Understanding that it’s going to be up and down at all moments, and it’s important to feel those moments, to live in that, to steep yourself in it, accept it and not try to avoid it.
What books are currently on your nightstand?
I was actually re-reading right now “Blue Sweater: Bridging the Gap Between Rich and Poor in an Interconnected World,” a book that’s written by Jacqueline Novogratz, the founder of Acumen. I am also reading “Superforecasting” [co-written by Phil Tetlock]. It’s a study done over a long period of time to get a sense of who the best forecasters have been and what it takes.
I’m also reading Ron Chernow’s “Hamilton” again because I just took my kids to see the Broadway show. I think I first checked it out in 2005, but it’s been interesting to revisit, especially with this election and what’s going on in the world. It’s made me think about how sometimes we have to go backwards in order to go forward to understand that these moments of tension lead to greatness over time. It’s the same idea as having to steep in the uncomfortable sometimes — looking back we may see that this election moment is one that the country has seen many times. It’s not new; it’s part of the process.
What do you wish someone had told you when you started this job?
I suppose, in a job or in life or anything, how you approach the unknown has to be done in partnerships. In looking at stocks or nonprofits or assessing whether something’s going to be successful or not, it’s always important to step out of your shell. It’s really about connecting people and trying to figure it out together. It’s a powerful way of looking at it, to see all of us being in it together. I think it helps see what the real issues are, as opposed to what your perceptions are.
What inspires you?
Well, at 4 o’clock each morning, I get a quote emailed to me. I go to a Unitarian church, All Souls, on the Upper East Side [of Manhattan], and the minister sends out a part of a poem or a quote to people who sign up. So, I have a little ritual surrounding it.
On the flip side, how do you try to inspire others?
Be true to your beliefs. Knowing what you stand for and standing by it, people actually see that’s your truth. And I also think it’s really important to be a cheerleader and not a de-constructor constantly. There’s so much dart throwing, as opposed to actually wanting to help. So many people are taking critical chances in this country. There’s so much progress, but what we hear about is the lack of it. I think it’s important to remind people — that’s one narrative, but not the only narrative.
[ph]
What innovations in your field are you most excited about right now?
I’ve been thinking a lot recently about software and faster processing speeds. I got my first computer in 1984. My mother was studying at the University of Chicago, where they had computers available for a greatly reduced price, and she brought one home. It was just such an immediate increase in productivity through technology. All my friends were using typewriters, and all of a sudden, I was writing on a word-processing machine. In college, I didn’t have to go to the computer lab like most of my friends. Eventually my machine connected to the Internet, and there was an incredible unleashing of ideas. By delivering software to so many different devices today, we’re at an inflection point. We saw the number of people connected to the Internet double since 2008. We now have over 3 billion people connected, but that’s only 40 percent of the world. Over the next five years, we may see well over 2 billion additional people come online. As a growth investor, I see this and think growth happens during the most difficult times. We don’t know what new services or inventions will be created that will benefit us all.
What’s your proudest accomplishment?
I think probably, in my life, I’ve been interested in understanding different perspectives, particularly of an outsider entering the country. I think we’re having a lot of that discussion on refugees: we versus them. I moved from Karachi to America, to just outside of Chicago. My family and I arrived in the middle of winter in the middle of nowhere. I experience the world around me as an outsider with fresh eyes, but I always felt like that was an opportunity, to see new perspectives in a new land that I’d never been to.
When I worked in Thailand, I tried to provide that too. I worked on a project where I asked Kodak and Fujifilm to give cameras to street children and then put on a big photo show. The perspective that gave me was really powerful. They were able to show me what they see, instead of me trying to understand from far away. I think that’s very important to me — that commitment to understand the complexities of a person or place from several sides — and I work on it as a personal accomplishment, as a way to live life. It’s fluid. It’s not something that will ever end. You hope that you continue that accomplishment on an hourly, daily basis.
To learn more about the NationSwell Council, click here.

This Is How You Reduce the Energy Consumption of Major American Cities

Posted on by robbie

When it comes to housing, New Yorkers face one big, wasteful problem: That strange set of pipes sitting underneath a window emitting banging and gurgling noises. Each frigid winter, countless Big Apple residents deal with a radiator that either doesn’t work or heats the apartment to a temperature and humidity level that’s more appropriate to a Floridian beach.
Most Manhattanites aren’t able to regulate their heat with a thermostat. Instead, pre-war buildings (constructed between 1900 and 1940) are warmed by a system that boils water in the basement and sends hot steam, which rises and warms rooms through a network of pipes. At installation time, these systems worked astonishingly well, facilitating the construction of the city’s upward-piercing skyline. But the introduction of double-paned glass windows and other retrofits changed the temperature needs for various rooms. So today, a landlord has to turn on the boiler for long enough to heat the coldest room (it’s virtually impossible to redirect steam heat), prompting overheated tenants to open their windows to the icy air outside to regulate the temperature.
Radiator Labs, a startup in downtown Brooklyn, N.Y., introduced the Cozy to eliminate this waste. The device fully insulates a radiator and pushes out heat via a fan that is wirelessly controlled by a resident’s smartphone or computer app. When the fan is off, the radiator becomes hotter and hotter, and its excess heat eventually diffuses back through the building’s pipes — signaling to the basement’s thermostat that all the rooms have been adequately heated. If Cozy is used building-wide, Radiator Labs reports that it can save up to one third of the energy required for heating.
Marshall Cox, the device’s inventor, lived in a “horribly overheated apartment” while he studied for his doctorate in engineering at Columbia University. He didn’t mind the temperature himself, but his brother, a professional ballet dancer, stayed with him for six months during a Broadway run and complained nonstop. Cox invented the system, essentially, “to shut him up,” he says.
Radiator Labs has already convinced 10 buildings to install the Cozy in every flat. With help from the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority, Cox has plans to expand to 40 buildings. Radiator Labs also sees vast growth potential in other urban cities that were built at the turn of the century, like Chicago or Philadelphia.
“If you want to put a dent in fuel consumption and pollution in big cities,” cutting out inefficiencies in heating — “the single largest energy expenditure” — is the way to go, Cox says. “For the first time in the history of the building,” he adds, “we’re making the tenant comfortable while reaping this benefit for the building owner.”
With the average American shelling out $3,052 on energy costs each year, the Cozy has the potential to provide huge monetary savings for apartment dwellers and immeasurable savings for the planet as well.
Homepage photo by Andrew Burton/Getty Images
MORE: 10 Do’s and Don’ts: Easy Ways to Save Energy — and Money — at Home

Emphasizing Learning over Memorization, This Group’s Students Achieve Life-Altering Success

Posted on by robbie

Eric Eisner is that teacher you feared, the instructor who set high expectations and believed his students would push themselves to meet them. He praises success, but doesn’t shy away from criticism. Maddening as the workload could be, he was the teacher whose class you appreciated most, since the challenge gave you a better sense of your own capabilities. Tough love, some might call it. “I’m rough, I’m abrasive and blunt,” Eisner says of his teaching style. “The thing in the jungle that bites.”
Eisner has no formal background in education. He came to it, by chance, as a second career. After graduating from New York’s Columbia Law School in 1973, he crossed coasts and entered the glitzy entertainment business in Los Angeles, working his way to the top spot as president of the David Geffen Company. Big paychecks bought a home in the city’s western hills, paid for his kids’ private school tuitions and allowed him to retire in his late forties.
Looking for a way to occupy his time outside of improving his golf game, Eisner was persuaded to get involved in a nonprofit in South Los Angeles, a low-income, predominantly Hispanic area. (It took some coaxing: “I had time, but I lacked the inclination to give it,” he confesses.) Eisner recalls not knowing what he could do for the families the nonprofit helped, but he wanted to meet the children to find out what made them tick. Partially, this was self-serving — he wanted to better understand his own children, whom he was losing in “the battle to pop culture” — but he also wanted to know why kids weren’t learning in school.
The roundabout answer to those questions led to the founding of Young Eisner Scholars (YES) in 1998, a group that took the “smart kids” out of regular classes for biweekly lessons on debate and language, helped them transfer to private, high-performing high schools and mentored them through college graduation and their first jobs.

Justin Hicks helps Leslie DeCuesta on a coding exercise during YES’s summer program.

YES has mobilized $50 million in financial aid and scholarships to fund its scholars’ tuition and underwrites college tours, application fees, summer programs and medical bills beyond a family’s budget. All that capital seems to have paid off. The scholars come from neighborhoods where two-thirds of students drop out of high school, but YES’s participants have been accepted to top-tier universities and won prestigious awards like the Fulbright, QuestBridge and Gates Millennium scholarships.
Eisner admits that YES was never founded with a long-term vision in mind. Instead, the group pivoted as they learned more, reacting with the critical thinking Eisner wants to see his kids develop. The program has found success in urban Los Angeles, Chicago and New York City, and this school year, it’s testing its worth in four schools in western North Carolina. (The expansion into Appalachia drastically increased the number of white children participating in YES.)
Justin Hicks, YES’s Appalachia program coordinator, says he spends much of his day in the car, driving 45 minutes to each school on one-lane switchbacked roads. A graduate of Appalachian State University in Boone, N.C., Hicks pitched the idea for a rural version of YES during his first phone interview with Eisner. In this role for less than a year (previously, he was an intern with the organization), Hicks sees cultural differences in what these children hope to be — youth saying they want to be carpenters and farmers when they grow up, instead of lawyers or doctors — but he doesn’t see a difference in their ambition, the way they learn or their intellect. For now, the program is waiting to see if children from rural backgrounds will express interest in attending first-rate schools far from home, like their first-generation immigrant, urban counterparts.
An essential part of YES’s strategy and the way Hicks runs his classrooms is with an emphasis on language. Typically in schools, children are judged by how they perform on tests. If they score well, they’re considered to be smarter. But once Eisner started prying into how much his students actually comprehend, he realized that they were often memorizing answers that would later appear on exams, rather than learning concepts.
In hour-long sessions during the school day, YES reverses the “I, We, You” model (the teacher demonstrates, the students practice with her aid, the kids do homework alone) into something closer to the Socratic method. There’s no instruction without student participation. In math lessons, this means that there are no equations, only word problems like “If two trains, 56 miles apart, leave stations at the same time…,” although the instructors often deliberately leave out the question. When learning vocabulary, flash cards are practically banned, because Eisner says, they often define words using other terms the kids barely understand. Instead, YES sessions involve personal discussion and debate over contemporary issues.
YES students complete a newspaper exercise.

While its students are thriving, Eisner’s answer might not be a scalable solution to our nation’s failing public schools. For one, YES requires huge sums of cash, which bars it from assisting more than a few dozen students in any given city. And troubling for some is the fact that YES plucks only the best students — the talented tenth, to use W.E.B. DuBois’s words — out of the public school system, leaving the most troubled students behind.
Eisner, for his part, would agree with DuBois about elevating the most exceptional students from low-income backgrounds is a way to bring along the rest of the class. He updates DuBois’s 1903 essay with a modern spin. “We are an advertising agency for educational aspiration. The fact that a kid goes to Harvard or Yale or Stanford or Columbia, there’s a little perfume that goes with them when they come home from school. It might reach a friend or cousin,” he says. “We succeed when these kids become glamorously successful.”
MORE: Only 1 in 5 New York City Students Graduates from College. This Nonprofit Is Going to Change That
 
 
 

10 Outstanding Solutions of 2015

Posted on by robbie

In a year when policing controversies, mass shootings and debates over immigration have dominated the headlines and discourse, there’s a group of inspirational pioneers at work. Not all of these individuals, policy makers and entrepreneurs are household names, but they all are improving this country by developing new ways to solve America’s biggest challenges. Here, NationSwell’s favorite solutions of the year.
THE GUTSY DAD THAT STARTED A BUSINESS TO HELP HIS SON FIND PURPOSE
Eighty percent of the workers at Rising Tide Car Wash, located in Parkland, Fla., are on the autism spectrum. Started by the father-and-son team of John and Tom D’Eri, Rising Tide gives their son and brother, Andrew, who was identified as an autistic individual at the age of three, and its other employees the chance to lead a fulfilling life. John and Tom determined that the car wash industry is a good match for those with autism since they’re more likely to be engaged by detailed, repetitive processes than those not on the spectrum. [ph]
THE ALLSTARS THAT ARE TACKLING SOME OF AMERICA’S GREATEST CHALLENGES
The six NationSwell AllStars — Karen Washington, Eli Williamson, Rinku Sen, Seth Flaxman, DeVone Boggan and Amy Kaherl — are encouraging advancements in education and environmental sustainability, making government work better for its citizens, engaging people in national service, advancing the American dream and supporting our veterans. Click here to read and see how their individual projects are moving America forward. [ph]
THE INDIANA COUNTY THAT HAS DONE THE MOST TO REDUCE INCOME INEQUALITY IN AMERICA
The Midwest exurb of Boone County, Ind., has reduced the ratio of the top 20th percentile’s earnings compared to the bottom 80th percentile by 23 percent — the largest decline for any American county with more than 50,000 residents and an achievement stumped county officials. NationSwell pieced together the story of how a land battle and a statewide tax revolt altered the course of Boone County. Find out exactly how it happened here. [ph]
THE TESLA CO-FOUNDER THAT’S ELECTRIFYING GARBAGE TRUCKS
Ian Wright’s new venture, Wrightspeed, is far less glamorous than his previous venture creating luxury electric sedans. But Wrightspeed, which is installing range-extended electric powertrains (the generators that electric vehicles run on) in medium- and heavy-duty trucks for companies like the Ratto Group, Sonoma and Marin counties’ waste hauler, and shipping giant FedEx, could have a greater impact on the environment than electrifying personal vehicles. Click here to learn how. [ph]
THE ORGANIZATION THAT IS TURNING A NOTORIOUS PROJECT INTO AN URBAN VILLAGE
Los Angeles’s large, 700-unit public housing development Jordan Downs consists of 103 identical buildings. Entryways to the two-story beige structures are darkened with black soot and grime, and the doors and windows are crossed with bars. Soon, the dilapidated complex will be revitalized by Joseph Paul, Jr., and his outreach team from SHIELDS for Families, which provides counseling, education and vocational training services. Read more about the plan, which calls for recreational parks and retail on site and would double the amount of available housing with 700 more units tiered at affordable and market rates. [ph]
THE HARDWORKING GROUP THAT’S RESTORING THE SHORELINE OF AMERICA’S LAST FRONTIER
Chris Pallister and his small, devoted crew are leading the largest ongoing marine cleanup effort on the planet. Since 2002, Pallister’s organization, Gulf of Alaska Keeper, has been actively cleaning beaches in Prince William Sound and the Northern Gulf Coast. The nonprofit’s five boats, seasonal crew of 12 and dozens of regular volunteers has removed an estimated 2.5 million pounds of marine debris (mostly plastic items washed ashore from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch) from more than 1,500 miles of coastline. [ph]
THE STATE THAT’S ENDING HOMELESSNESS WITH ONE SIMPLE IDEA
Utah set the ambitious goal to end homelessness in 2015. As the state’s decade-long “Housing First” program, an initiative to place the homeless into supportive housing without any prerequisites, wraps up this year, it’s already reduced chronic homelessness (those with deeper disabling conditions, like substance abuse or schizophrenia, who had been on the streets for a year or longer or four times within three years) by 72 percent and is on track to end it altogether by early next year. Read more about the initiative here. [ph]
THE RESIDENT THAT’S REBUILDING NEW ORLEANS’S MOST DEVASTATED WARD
New Orleans native Burnell Cotlon wants to feed his 3,000 neighbors. So he’s turned a two-story building that was destroyed by catastrophic flooding during Hurricane Katrina in 2005 (along with most of the Lower 9th Ward community) into a shopping plaza. Already, he’s opened a barbershop, a convenience store, and a full-service grocery store in a neighborhood that has been identified as a food desert. [ph]
THE MAN THAT’S GIVING CAREERS TO UNEMPLOYED MILITARY VETERANS
“They had our backs, let’s keep the shirts on theirs” is more than just a motto for Mark Doyle. It’s the business model on which he built Rags of Honor, his silk-screen printing company based in Chicago that provides employment and other services to veterans. In the three years since its inception, Rags of Honor has grown from four employees to 22, all but one of whom are veterans at high risk of homelessness. [ph]
THE PRESIDENT THAT’S PRESERVING OUR ENVIRONMENT FOR FUTURE GENERATIONS
After promising to slow the rise of the oceans and to heal our planet during his 2008 campaign, President Barack Obama has faltered on environmental legislation during his first term, preferring to expend his political capital on the Affordable Care Act. But the 44th president’s use of regulatory authority and his agreement with China likely ensure his place in the pantheon of modern environmental champions. Here’s why. [ph]
 

The American Dream Isn’t Dead. This Is How Immigrant Families Are Achieving It

Posted on by robbie

Every year, more than 20 Americans are named MacArthur Fellows and given a $625,000 stipend for being, well, geniuses. Across the arts and sciences, their personalities and contributions often loom large — this year, think Lin-Manuel Miranda (the playwriting prodigy of Broadway’s “Hamilton” and “In the Heights” fame) or Ta-Nehisi Coates (perhaps the foremost author and voice of the black American experience in the news media today).
Some MacArthur geniuses, however, labor in significantly less lauded roles, doing their work on a much smaller scale. That’s the case for Juan Salgado, who has spent the last 15 years at the helm of southwest Chicago’s Instituto del Progreso Latino. The adult vocational training school appears modest on the surface. Yet dig in, and you’ll find an educational program with a surprisingly high 80 percent graduation rate — better than most high schools and college degree programs across the nation — and a radical approach to community support. What’s the Instituto doing? It’s asking poverty-level working parents to give up their evenings (over the course of three or more years) to improve their potential for employment through language and vocational training. It’s promising to lift families out of poverty and fulfill their American dreams. And it’s working.

Students congregate after classes let out from Instituto del Progreso Latino on Tuesday, Nov. 3, 2015.

Forty to 60 percent of residents of south and west Chicago are living below the poverty line, according to data collected by the New York Times. Those who come to Instituto are usually facing even more dire straits: they are often immigrants, and their average annual income is between $14,000 and $18,000. Having just around a 6th grade level education, they’re underemployed, working menial labor jobs, and supporting an average of 3.1 children.
So how do you help these families move forward and upward? When the Instituto opened in 1977, it focused on basic adult education needs for the local Latino community: how to pass a citizenship test and how to improve English-language skills. In 2001, Salgado became president and CEO of the Instituto and realized that these tools weren’t enough.
“We weren’t really connecting that adult learner with a specific career path where there were going to be jobs — where there was going to be opportunity to build. We weren’t connecting them to post-secondary education in a meaningful way,” he explains. Recognizing that assistance needed to stretch even further, Salgado emphasized that the second generation, the kids, would have to be part of the solution, as well.
It’s this holistic circular vision — a center that caters to the full needs of an entire family, from basic learning to career pipelines to childcare — that has fueled the success of Instituto in recent years. It takes a village, and Salgado has made the Instituto that much-needed community support system.
Juan Salgado, president and CEO of Instituto del Progreso Latino, in his office.

Mirna Holton, who served as associate director of the Instituto for three years and now sits on its governing board, notes that the increase in focus came at a critical moment. “It was a phenomenal time for big ideas… We challenged ourselves in the way that our families and individuals challenged themselves by shifting perspectives.”
The first step: identifying nearby career opportunities. Salgado sought out industries with robust job markets and gains that Instituto participants could realistically access. Manufacturing and nursing stood out as the most promising options. From there, the Instituto prepares students for the secondary degrees they need to enter those career paths with its Carreras en Salud and Manufacturing Technology Bridge Programs. Each has specialized training to bring adult students up to speed and introduce them to the skills and language they’d need. The important thing was to transform a 6th-grade-level education into a high-school-graduate education, but in fewer than the six years it normally takes to get there.
Participants spend five nights a week in classes for four or more hours at a time‚ the equivalent of attending high school while working a full-time job and managing a family. “We turn that into a 3-year deal,” emphasizes Salgado. “We’re doing accelerated learning. We’re doing contextualized learning. And we’re focusing in on a career occupation that the student is motivated for.”
To help students with the rigorous schedule, the Instituto offers a key service: family support. The nursing preparation track, in particular, draws a crowd of single mothers; Salgado estimates that 60 percent of its students provide for their children independently. Since they need childcare while they’re in class each evening, the Instituto provides it, along with a healthy meal. “The trick is, how do you get [the mothers] to juggle one or two fewer things?” asks Salgado. “It’s all about reducing complexity so they can be successful in the learning process.”
Nursing program participants have found that success. In less than a decade, about 500 students became licensed practical nurses, and more than 200 are currently enrolled. “Once they’re licensed nurses, 100 percent of them get a job,” boasts Salgado. Along with employment comes a significant pay raise. Instead of making less than $10 an hour, they’re now receiving $24 an hour and up. “It’s life changing.”
Finally, seeing that the kids need schooling to match their parents’, Salgado identified a third need: educating children. So the Instituto opened two charter high schools for the next generation.
Full circle support.
Inside Chicago’s Instituto del Progreso Latino.

It’s “creative leadership,” as the MacArthur Foundation puts it, that defines Instituto’s success. With more than 10,000 people receiving some form of assistance each year, according to ThinkProgress, the organization is an integral part of the Windy City. And because of its “collectivist manner,” as Holton describes it, nothing is embarked upon without taking the queues from the community itself.
But as Instituto has expanded, it has also encountered a common roadblock: funding.
Right now, the organization depends equally on private and public support, accessing funds from the government and from local Chicago philanthropies like the Chicago Community Trust and national organizations such as the JP Morgan Chase Foundation, Forbes Foundations and the Aspen Institute. But Salgado and his team are not satisfied. Without a sustainable solution, they’re just another drain on the charitable economy. If the purpose of the adult training program is to provide a pathway for long-term career development, Salgado believes that the Instituto needs its own forward-thinking growth plan.
For that, he’s looking to new models — specifically, a revolving loan fund with the promise that students don’t pay unless their careers are set and their income is stable. “If we don’t get you there, you won’t pay us back,” says Salgado. “That’s risky, but our results have been pretty solid,” he says. A loan fund would keep the capital flowing, removing the Instituto from a nonprofit’s typical Sisyphean struggle of fundraising and spending. Instead, Salgado wants to put in motion a self-sustaining cycle of mobility.
“You know, in the business world, they take a bunch of chances, and there’s a whole culture for taking chances, right? And people get extremely rewarded for taking chances, right?” he muses. “In our work, there are all these disincentives to take chances, so everybody plays it safe, right? And as a result, we don’t often make as much progress as we actually need to.”
Salgado’s ready to take a risk in order to bring Instituto’s best practices out of Chicago and onto the national stage. Already, the Instituto provides technical assistance to groups looking to emulate their techniques in California, Indiana, Minnesota, and Texas. With the MacArthur grant, that list is likely to grow further. Because, as he says, “Almost every one of our cities could qualify for this.”

This Veteran Refuses To Leave His Unemployed and Debt-Ridden Comrades Behind

Posted on by robbie

When Eli Williamson returned from two deployments to the Middle East, his hometown of Chicago felt at times like a foreign battleground, the memory of desert roads more familiar than Windy City central thoroughfares. As he relearned the city, Williamson noticed a strange similarity between veterans like himself and the young people growing up in tough parts of Chicago. Too many had witnessed violence, and they had little support to cope with the trauma.
Applying the timeworn principle of leaving no soldier, sailor, airman or marine behind, Williamson co-founded Leave No Veteran Behind (LNVB), a national nonprofit focused on securing education and employment for our warriors. Williamson formed the organization based on “just real stupid” and “crazy” idealism: “You know what?” he says. “I can make a difference.” Since work began in 2008, with a measly operating budget of $4,674 to help pay off student loans, LNVB has eliminated around $150,000 of school debt and provided 750 transitional jobs, Williamson says.
“Coming out of the military, every individual is going to have his or her challenges,” says Williamson, who served as a psychological operations specialist and an Arabic linguist in Iraq in 2004 and in Afghanistan in 2007. “We’ve seen veterans with substance abuse issues, homelessness issues.” Additionally, at least one in five veterans suffer from PTSD, and almost 50,000 are homeless and 573,000 are unemployed.
Williamson started the group with his childhood friend Roy Sartin. They first met in high school, when they joined choir and band together. “I think we’ve been arguing like old women every since,” Williamson says. Both joined the U.S. Army Reserves while at Iowa’s Luther College and were mobilized to active duty during their senior year after the Twin Towers fell. Williamson finished his education at the Special Warfare Training Center at Fort Bragg in North Carolina, while Sartin put his learning on hold.
Upon return, both struggled with crippling interest rates on their student loans. Sartin received a call from the loan company saying that he needed to make a $20,000 payment. “Although I had the funds, it was just enough to get myself back together. So, for me, the transition wasn’t as tough, but I was one of the lucky ones.” Williamson got a bill for $2,200 only 22 days before the balance was due. Desperate, he took to the streets playing music to cover the costs.
After talking with other vets, the two realized that many didn’t qualify for the military’s debt repayment programs. That’s when they started going out to financial sources for “retroactive scholarships” for our country’s defenders. And they sought employment opportunities for former military members to help cover the rest.
Jobs and debt relief for our nation’s warriors are the main focus of LNVB, but the group oversees several initiatives, including S.T.E.A.M. Corps, which pairs vets with science, technology, engineering, arts, and math experience with at-risk youth. More than 200 students have graduated from S.T.E.A.M., but Williamson, director of veteran affairs at the Robert R. McCormick Foundation, points to a more intangible benefit of his non-profit’s work: the ability for veterans “to articulate a larger vision of themselves … is our advocacy mission,” he says.
“Veterans can paint a vision for where our country needs to be, and the only reason we can do that is because you realize that you are part of something larger than yourself,” Williamson adds. “That’s a fundamental value that veterans can share, as they leave military, with the communities that they come back to.” For those who’ve just returned home from Operations Enduring Freedom and Iraqi Freedom, in other words, service is just beginning.

One App Has Revolutionized How the Red Cross Mobilizes Volunteers

Posted on by robbie

Volunteers for the American Red Cross of Chicago & Northern Illinois respond to three or four disasters every single day — a total of 1,200 emergencies around the Windy City every year. Most of the incidents are house fires, and at least two of the group’s 1,740 disaster helpers show up at the scene while embers are still smoking to offer shelter, transportation, financial assistance, food, water, clothing and blankets.
That is, if the volunteers get there in time. Until recently, dispatchers picked up the phone after receiving an emergency alert and started going down a list of names. “It was all individual phone calls, one by one,” Jim McGowan, regional director of planning and situational awareness for the Red Cross, tells NationSwell. “It was typically a list in a spreadsheet. It was as good — or as bad — as on paper. We would try to figure out who was closest and then call that person first and hope they can go.” Not surprisingly, the phone tree method proved clunky and inefficient. Too often, assistance arrived at a house dripping with cold firehose water and no one in sight.
Recently, a new open-source application built by John Laxson, an engineer and Red Cross volunteer based in San Francisco, has helped the Chicago regional Red Cross vastly improve its emergency response. With the technology’s help, dispatchers in the Second City now identify volunteers twice as fast.
“We’re not first responders. We’re not going there to put the fire out, so the work that we do isn’t life or death. However, typically in a city like Chicago, where it’s really hot or really cold, we want to get assistance to that client as fast as possible,” McGowan says. “If it takes us took long to get there and the conditions are harsh, that person is going to seek help elsewhere…a friend’s house, a restaurant, the police station. We lose that opportunity to connect with them to begin with, [and they miss] out on services because we’re too slow to respond.”
The system is built with the responders in mind. They input their availability into a schedule, so dispatchers don’t waste time dialing people at work or out of town. When a fire, flood, or other calamity occurs, the dispatcher (also a volunteer) enters its address and receives a list of available names sorted by travel time. After the volunteer arrives, he or she can text updates back to the central hub.
Automatic text messaging and other so-called “cloud communications” are trending in the nonprofit world, bringing volunteerism into smartphone era. For instance, Polaris Project and Thorn use the “BeFree” text messaging hotline to combat human trafficking; the Arkansas Children’s Hospital, the country’s sixth largest pediatric hospital, sends reminders to patients’ cell phones to put a small dent in the 250 daily no-shows that were costing the medical institution tens of millions of dollars annually; and the Crisis Text Line offers round-the-clock support for distressed teenagers.
Nonprofits always face the problem of limited means: they take on huge challenges and stretch their budgets as far as they can go. Fortunately, as the Red Cross has found, the web is making it easier than ever to mobilize volunteers. Maybe being hooked to our iPhones isn’t so bad after all. Our chance to do something good is just a text away.
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This T-Shirt Could Be the Difference Between a Veteran Having a Home and Living on the Streets

Posted on by robbie

“They had our backs, let’s keep the shirts on theirs” is more than just a motto for Mark Doyle. It’s the business model on which he built Rags of Honor, his veteran-operated business.
Originally a consultant, Doyle was deployed to Afghanistan in 2010 as a forensic accountant for the Army. After returning to the U.S., he saw the same men and women who had given their lives for their country struggling to survive. In fact, only one quarter of returning soldiers between the ages of 19 and 25 were employed. Even worse, many were homeless or at risk of losing their homes.
“I could never square when I got back the commitment that they made every day, with the reality of their life when they came home,” Doyle says.
Founded in 2012, Rags of Honor is a silk-screen printing company based in Chicago that provides employment and other services to veterans. In the three years since its inception, Rags of Honor has grown from four employees to 22, all but one of whom are veterans at high risk of homelessness.
To read more about Rags of Honor, click here.