Austin Educational Program Providers Meeting Featuring Mayoral New Initiative: My Chi. My Future.
Event attendees came from a multitude of different community focused agencies throughout Chicago. Photo by Nicole Shih
Projection Exploration held a meeting inviting all Austin youth program providers and facilitators to discuss how they could best support youth from the West Side of Chicago with the support of Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s initiative, My Chi. My Future (MCMF) last month. The meeting broke into several parts including table discussions and programming activities.
My Chi. My Future, a new initiative from Mayor Lightfoot, aims to ensure every youth in Chicago has an out-of-school experience during their spring/summer/winter break and to own equal opportunity in education. Sybil Madison, the deputy mayor for education and human services at City of Chicago, attended the providers meeting. Madison announced that as young people spend so much time outside of schools, the mayor is investing in youth's future by operating the program MCMF, for them to meet their partners who have the same interests and passion.
“The spaces out of schools are so important for their development as these are places where youth understand what they’re good at, what they like, and what they’re passionate about,” said Madison.
The majority of the meeting attendees came from different non-profit organizations. Those organizations provide services including violence prevention, youth development, social services, health and wellness care and so forth.
Natasha Smith-Walker, who hosted the meeting, is the board director of Projection Exploration. Project Exploration is a non-profit educational program delivering STEM programs impacting underserved communities. Smith-Walker welcomed every Austin youth program provider participating in the meeting with the highlights of the grand mission for MCMF and the educational programs in Chicago, which is to connect every youth to a variety of youth-centered out-of-school experience, regardless of race, gender, age, immigration status, etc.
“We have a really big vision, is to make sure that every young person connects to an opportunity that is enriching, engaging, and it is centered on the young person for the experience of the opportunity on it,” said Smith-Walker.
Participants were assigned to write programs ideas on a note and paste them to a calendar for 2020. They also shared important and feasible ideas which are able to attain the summer 2020 goal. One food provider said, some schools or programs lack refrigerators, so they decided to partner with those education institutions.
Participants write down concrete ideas that could make a better community environment for Austin’s youth. Photo by Nicole Shih
MCMF is thinking of the systemic change and the equity, which is to create a dataset to demonstrate the needs for them to interact and rethink the programming. A government-based inquiry form allows program providers to add their educational programs, and the information would directly be stored in the dataset. The use of databases is a way to remain equity as it allows government to see the unbalanced status in Chicago in student interests, existing activities, community assets, safety and so on, so that the mayor could come up with a corresponding policy for youth in every neighborhood in Chicago.