Work

LISC Chicago Begins Integrating Digital Skills into Financial Opportunity Centers

Denise Linn

Under Connect Chicago, LISC Chicago Financial Opportunity Centers are integrating digital skills training into their programming. This investment was launched on Saturday April 16th by Mayor Rahm Emanuel and other Chicago leaders.

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This investment builds on an infrastructure of trusted community institutions that already provide income support, financial literacy training, and job training to residents. The blending of digital training components with traditional LISC programming has created pilot successes in the past. Under the Smart Communications Demonstration between 2011-2012, LISC Chicago Financial Opportunity Centers found that patrons who participated in digital skill training alongside other support services were 50% more likely to get a job than those that didn’t.

To assist with this integration, LISC Chicago hired Skill Scout. According to the Skill Scout website:

Skill Scout’s team is comprised of professionals with deep experience in workforce development, community organization, community collaboration, and the design and deployment of novel solutions in the market.

We came together through our work at gravitytank, on a design project to connect job seekers to employment in a more meaningful way.

There are 10 LISC Chicago Financial Opportunity Centers (formerly known as Centers for Working Families) where digital skills training will be integrated:

  • Center for Changing Lives
  • Central States SER
  • Chicago Commons
  • Instituto del Progreso Latino – Pilsen Site
  • Jane Addams Resource Corporation
  • Metropolitan Family Services
  • North Lawndale Employment Network
  • Preservation of Affordable Housing (POAH)
  • Safer Foundation
  • The Cara Program – Quad Communities.

We know that there are other community organizations that are seeking to integrate digital skills training into their work and missions. For instance, the Chicago Citywide Literacy Coalition has created a Technology Pilot Program to embed computer training in adult education and literacy work. LISC Chicago, under Connect Chicago, will not only integrate digital skills into their programming, but also share out their integration experience and lessons with others. By sharing, they can benefit institutions across Chicago as well as LISC Financial Opportunity Centers nationwide.

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Skill Scout’s first task was to scan the field and assess existing Financial Opportunity Center services, resources, and challenges. On April 14th, Skill Scout convened representatives from Financial Opportunity Centers and shared preliminary findings from this first phase of work. A few themes arose:

It’s important to break down “training silos”

Digital skills shouldn’t always be taught as a completely separate track – rather, there should and can be multiple formal and informal ways of onboarding people into learning computer and technology skills.

For instance, a Resume Prep Class should leave students with a completed resume, but also leave them proficient in Microsoft Word and give them the knowledge they need to save and forward that resume electronically. Or, a financial coach assisting with a job search can teach a student how to use Google Maps – that job seeker can use the map to scan businesses in their neighborhood and see where they might want to apply first.

There is a need for more (or at least centralized) instructional tools

IMG_6864LISC Financial Opportunity Center staff took inventory of some of their favorite teaching tools and online resources: Blue Ocean Logic, Credit Karma, Kahn Academy, and Google forms. One trainer even mentioned that she likes to create mock online job applications through Google forms so that students can get comfortable with with forms and typing. Also, because it’s on a Google form that she controls, she can see their answers and give them feedback.

Staff at Financial Opportunity Centers mentioned that majority of their students have smartphones. Some want instruction to set up an email account on a smartphone, workshops coming up on taking professional pictures, or instructions to forward a resume. Also, students sometimes don’t know how to transfer skills from a smartphone to a computer. Some students even try to type up their resume on their smartphones. Creating a suite of tutorials to meet this demand for smartphone instruction is something that the Connect Chicago Meetup has discussed before.

Building in practice time is key

All agreed that all teaching tools and methods should be interactive and hands-on, if possible. When learning new skills, regular practice is just as important as learning. Since people in programs at Financial Opportunity Centers are very busy, it’s important to build purposeful practice time into existing lessons instead of filling the entire time with instruction.

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There is demand for more coordinated, standardized assessment

Trainers and staff agreed: regular, standardized pre and post instruction assessment that trainers could use across Financial Opportunity Centers would be ideal.

Northstar is an assessment that Chicago Commons recommended the Northstar assessment uses. The assessment gives them enough information to understand the needs of students. The Center for Changing Lives pointed out that all pre and post assessment done should be in the context of a concrete goal relevant to the student’s life.

Skill Scout Videos for LISC Chicago Financial Opportunity Centers

Skill Scout worked with LISC Financial Opportunity Center staff and trainers to develop short video tutorials to address some of the most common student challenges: uploading a resume, copying & pasting, twin accounts, how to understand your paycheck, and how to access benefits. For the “How to Access Benefits” tutorial, Skill Scout highlighted MRelief, an all-woman software development team that Smart Chicago has supported through our CivicWorks Project and tested through CUTGroup.

See them below:

Smart Chicago’s Recap of the Connect Chicago Launch

Denise Linn

On April 16th, a coalition of public and private partners announced the next chapter in Chicago’s digital leadership: Connect Chicago. Smart Chicago joined the Chicago Public Library, LISC Chicago, World Business Chicago, Chicago Public Schools, the Chicago Public Library Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, the Connect Chicago Technology Advisory Council, and Mayor Rahm Emanuel in launching this initiative.

Omar talking

Internet access is key, but Connect Chicago doesn’t stop there. Connect Chicago seeks to increase access to the Internet, increase digital skills, and increase civic & economic engagement through technology. This will be accomplished by investing in leadership, the scaling of evidence-based programs, and innovation.

Mayor Rahm Emanuel held up Connect Chicago as an example of what can be accomplished through public-private partnerships. Through Connect Chicago, digital learning opportunities will be made available citywide through Chicago Public Library Branches and LISC Financial Opportunity Centers.

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Smart Chicago is proud to be the home for this important work. Connect Chicago speaks to two of our focus areas: access and skills. From our seat at the Chicago Community Trust, we have hosted and encouraged a community of practice around digital equity through Connect Chicago Meetups. The trainers and community organizations involved work everyday to close technology gaps. We will continue to build community, collaboration, and innovation across the entire ecosystem.

See this blog post by Dan X. O’Neil to access pictures and see the press release from Mayor Rahm Emanuel.

For more information on Connect Chicago, visit connectchicago.org. To get involved and receive regular updates about Connect Chicago, fill out this form.

Smart Chicago’s Twitter Recap of the Connect Chicago Launch

Smart Chicago at the After School Matters and Borderbend Arts & Tech Fair

Denise Linn

On April 9th, Smart Chicago participated in the After School Matters & Borderbend Arts & Tech Fair at the Segundo Ruiz Belvis Cultural Center.

We met the youth, enjoyed performances from programs like Chicago Kaleidoscopes & Spoken Word Academy of Chicago, and shared information from our Connect Chicago network of programs.

Here are just some arts & tech learning spaces for youth interested in summer STEAM experiences:

YOUmedia at Chicago Public Library Branches

YOUmedia is a library and studio space at Chicago Public Library branches designed specifically for teens. You can hang out, mess around and geek out on projects to create your own music, video, 2D and 3D design, photos and podcasts with help from skilled mentors. YOUmedia equipment is available for free with your valid Chicago Public Library card.

Little Black Pearl

Location: 1060 East 47th Street Chicago, Illinois 60653. Little Black Pearl (LBP) is a nonprofit serving youth in the Kenwood/Oakland, Woodlawn, and Bronzeville neighborhoods. Their Teen Tech Center is a space that enables teens from Chicago to gain access to technological tools, resources and opportunities in music, multi-media, video, graphics, digital photography, engineering and animation.

Street-Level Youth Media

Location: 1637 North Ashland Avenue, Chicago, IL 60622. Street-Level offers free media arts training to youth & young adults from ages 13 to 24. Experienced teachers, artists, and mentors teach year-round workshops at their multimedia center.

Adler Planetarium STEM Teen Programs

Location: 1300 S Lake Shore Dr. Chicago, IL 60605. The Adler’s Teen Programs focus on providing technical and professional skills, mentorship, and a welcoming learning environment for Chicago high school students of all backgrounds, interests, and abilities. They introduce you to new skills like web development, game development, robotics and more.

This list is just the beginning. There are over 250 locations in Chicago where you can access technology, training, & Wi-Fi.

Thank you to all the youth from the Arts & Tech Fair that shared their talents!

Big Data & the Public Good: A Conversation about Array of Things at SAIC

Denise Linn

On April 4th, Illinois Humanities hosted “Big Data & the Public Good” at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. The event overviewed the Array of Things urban sensing project and facilitated a conversation on the role of technology in contemporary society. Smart Chicago’s Executive Director Dan O’Neil moderated the event. The featured presenters were Douglas Pancoast and Marissa Lee Benedict.

This program was organized by the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and was supported in part by the Robert R. McCormick Foundation. On the event website, the event’s framing questions on big data, technology, and democracy were listed: 

What is the relationship between information technology, urban space, and the public good in the age of big data? Where do “smart cities” initiatives like the Array of Things – which doesn’t collect any information about individuals – fit into contemporary conversations about privacy and surveillance? How can the arts and humanities help our society think through these issues?

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Douglas Pancoast, an Associate Professor of Interior Architecture and Designed Objects at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, designed the Array of Things sensor enclosures along with Satya Mark Basu. Pancoast gave background on the project and shared the evolving iterations of the design:

Pancoast overviewed the functionality of the Array of Things nodes — that they will measure air quality, standing water, noise pollution, wind, light, pedestrian traffic, and other environmental factors. Wired Magazine called Array of Things a “Fitbit for the City.”

The second speaker, Marissa Lee Benedict, gave an artist’s perspective on Array of Things. Benedict is a lecturer at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in Sculpture and Fiber & Material Studies, and works as the Program Coordinator for the Arts, Science & Culture Initiative at the University of Chicago. As an artist, Benedict can approach technology with a different perspective — she can see the art in data and fiber-optic cables. She can also assist with activist gestures in a way other people working with technology cannot.

What is the value of open data from urban sensors?

Several themes arose from the audience questions at the event. The first theme centered on the expected benefits of Array of Things and the data it would produce.

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Pancoast pointed out that society has always placed value in creating and investing in archived, searchable collections of information. Organizing and sharing the data produced from an urban sensing project arguably has the same societal value of building and filling a library with books.

Still, communicating the value of collecting data through urban sensors also means articulating compelling, relevant use cases of the data. The value of open data from this smart city infrastructure is less clear unless there are specific examples of how data can be turned into local action:

Pancoast shared several problems that could be identified and illuminated by Array of Things data. Some examples:

  • Understanding how exhaust activity at O’Hare impacts surrounding property values
  • Understanding how noise pollution in certain areas of the city should impact zoning
  • Understanding the source of standing water

One specific case highlighted was Albany Park. Albany Park has a high incidences of flooding. If we could watch it, monitor where the water goes, how long it takes to evaporate and see how it correlates to other environmental factors, the problem can be better defined.

Engagement & Participation

Of course, problem identification isn’t enough to catalyze change. Communities have to be involved and empowered to act on the new information. In this light, another main theme from the event was resident engagement: what type of engagement is needed, who to engage with, and how to do it well. Specifically, there was an interest in how Chicagoans might broadly engage with the Array of Things project outside of targeted efforts in schools and youth programs. At Smart Chicago, we are committed to this broad engagement with urban sensing and the Internet of Things.

Benedict shared the following thought-provoking questions with the audience:

questions AT

Dan O’Neil shared some of the best practices that Smart Chicago has gleaned: do engagement work as openly as possibly, document your process and planning, invite everyone, and “fetishize the outputs.” One recent example of model of engagement is Smart Chicago’s work with the Chicago Police Accountability Task Force Community Forums.

This event facilitated an interesting conversation about data, participation, and urban sensors — a conversation that needs to be continued openly, interactively, and across different venues in Chicago. Smart Chicago is committed to broad community engagement on the Array of Things project. To learn more about this work, visit our project page.

Smart Chicago Documenter Work on the Chicago Police Accountability Task Force Community Forums

Smart Chicago

The Smart Chicago Collaborative has been documenting the four community forums hosted by the Chicago Police Accountability Task Force and held across the city in the month of February.

The purpose of the meetings is to provide residents the opportunity to speak or submit written comments on improving the accountability, oversight and training of Chicago’s police officers.

We care about justice and we care about accountability, so we have sent text documenters, videographers (Community TV Network), and a photographer (me) to these convenings under our Documenters program, which “an essential tool for us to add new thinkers, generate ideas, and expand the field for civic tech.”

We show up at public meetings and document the proceedings because we’re interested in paying as much attention as we can to what others are saying, what their concerns are, and how they interact with official government structures. These community forums give us a great opportunity for this. We have a number of goals for this series:

  • Document the actual proceedings, with special attention, in this instance, to the speakers from the public— exactly what questions were asked, what documents were referenced, and what answers were offered by the task force
  • Research the questions and answers to the greatest degree possible. This includes learning more about the speakers, many of whom have decades of experience in their communities. Research and link to their organizations, their work, and the external documents, cases, and other matters that they reference
  • Aggregate the information and draw some rudimentary conclusions. This means simple things like counting attendees and speakers as well as some more sophisticated analysis like grouping comment types and themes

Toward that end, here’s our documentation for meeting #1, held at on Tuesday, February 2, 2016 at Mt. Vernon Baptist Church JLM Life Center, 2622 W. Jackson Blvd.

The meeting notes:

The video (as taken by the Task Force and placed on their youtube channel), and this one, taken by Community TV Network, posted on the Smart Chicago youtube channel):

And photographs taken by me (download them all here in hi res) under Creative Commons 4.0 license).

Lastly, we want to document the format of the meetings— the exact mode of engagement. This includes things like location type, timing, room setup, speaker format, microphone placement, comment rules— all the things that make up the meeting so that we can help build an overall typology for public meetings. That’s next.

For now, please consider attending one or both of the last two meetings

Connect Chicago January 2016 Meetup Recap: Co-Creating a Digital Access & Skills Ecosystem

Denise Linn

On Friday January 29th, trainers, program coordinators, and public sector leaders from all across Chicago came together to Co-Create a Digital Access & Skills Referral Network for Chicago.

We were pleased to see friends and collaborators from Chicago Public Library, Microsoft, Safer Foundation, Blue 1647, YWCA Chicago, Jane Addams Resource Corporation, Literacy Works, LISC Chicago, Chicago Housing Authority, and many other institutions in attendance.

Why build this network? First, there is obvious value in taking inventory of all of the digital/tech skill-building programs in the city. Second, after the inventory is taken, we, as a sector, can begin to understand how our work fits together. By simply knowing where Adler Planetarium can recruit new youth, or where the Cara Program can refer its patrons to next, we illuminate learning pathways for Chicago residents.

To see a growing list of Connect Chicago people and programs, see our Twitter list.

You can read about our inspiration for hosting this event here and read more about the taxonomy that organized the event here.

Discovering Learning Pathways Across Programs

This was a highly interactive Meetup. Every program in attendance had a poster complete with detailed program information (from this survey), a flyer, an envelope for business cards or feedback, and space for others to mark if:

“I would refer my patrons to this program”

– and / or –

“I would recruit patrons who completed this program”

See Career Transitions Center of Chicago’s poster for an example:

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This was a “low tech” method of getting rich, hard-to-collect data from scattered sources.

If you enlarge the image above, you’ll see a hypothetical learning pathway for a resident. A digital learner in Chicago might start at Preservation of Affordable Housing (POAH). POAH might then might refer that patron to Career Transitions Center of Chicago for both emotion/professional support as digital skills are improved. Then, if that patron is interested in the manufacturing field, they can go from Career Transitions Center of Chicago to the Jane Addams Resource Corporation (JARC). That is just one route to a goal. We want to illuminate more.

At the end of the Meetup event, we raffled off funds to one of the participating programs. We were pleased to award $1000 in funds to the Jack Ehrlich Literacy Program at the Anixter Center – a training program that provides one-on-one mentoring to adults with disabilities. According to Anixter’s Digital Access & Skills Referral Network Survey Response:

“We have a general computer class to teach internet navigation, typing, mouse usage, etc. Learners can work 1:1 on any computer skills they wish. We have iPads and touchscreen computers, and accessible technology, all of which people can learn to use.”

The city is filled with programs like Anixter. These programs and training sites work everyday, playing their specialized role in strengthening the digital access & skills ecosystem of Chicago.

Resources from the Meetup

You can access all the resources from the January Meetup in the Connect Chicago Shared Google Folder. In this folder you’ll find:

  • A spreadsheet of the Digital Access & Skills Referral Network Survey responses. Note: If you are a participating program and see an email address or item that you would prefer not to be shared publically, please email
  • High resolution pictures of every featured program poster at the Meetup (including
  • Every program flyer featured at the Meetup
  • Notes from the Meetup. There is a section in the notes where organizations can post announcements and resources — we encourage everyone to contribute.
  • The presentation from the Meetup.

The work isn’t over. We plan to build on this material with your help. Digital/tech training programs or access programs can still fill out the Digital Access & Skills Referral Network Survey to be included.

Thank you to all of the training sites and programs that participated in the January 29th Connect Chicago Meetup! More data and tools will be released as a result of this great work. Follow the Smart Chicago blog for news and updates.