Chicago Learning Exchange

Community: The Organization convenes and supports a year-around community of primarily out-of-school time mentors and leaders to re-imagine and expand out-of-school time opportunities. The organization does this through monthly Meetups, which are onramps for OST practitioners to break down information silos; help organizations and educators build capacity through sharing in knowledge and growing social capital; Communities of Practice, which are longer in time and design in order to create and share knowledge about specific issues or topics (e.g. Youth Mentorship, Anti-Racism work).

Chicago Learning Days: The Organization leads a week-long citywide learning festival to amplify the work of our year-around Community by turning Chicago into an open and dynamic learning laboratory with more than 100 hands-on learning opportunities in schools, museums, libraries, parks, and community centers across Chicago. The purpose of the festival is to increase equity by raising awareness of in-school and out-of-school time opportunities for youth and families who are furthest from opportunity by offering free and fun opportunities to connect and try out learning and work opportunities across an area of disciplines (i.e. youth media, civics, art, maker, STEM, CS, and more).

Pathways: Youth learning and work pathways are routes that build connected and progressive experiences, skills, and relationships a young person has from childhood to adulthood. The Organization works to address systems-level inequities in in-school and out-of-school (OST) pathways experiences for youth in Chicago by building programs and convening OST organizations in STEM-related fields to address other barriers in fields such as energy and computer science.