Grant Support for Hunger Relief Across Chicago
The current crisis has put a significant strain on traditional resources, like food banks and school lunch programs, that many families across Chicago depend on. CME Group Foundation is proud to support the World Central Kitchen, the Greater Chicago Food Depository, and the Children First Fund to immediately aid hunger relief across Chicago.
Closing the Degree Divide with OneGoal
OneGoal is an innovative program working to ensure that every young person in Chicago has an equal opportunity to achieve their greatest postsecondary aspirations. OneGoal, which aims to support over 8,000 students by 2022, enlists and trains high-school educators and purposefully targets historically underserved and academically underperforming high school students from open-enrollment neighborhoods and charter schools.
Teaching Kids to Design, Debug, and Deploy Apps Remotely
After School Matters has an innovative tech program, IDEALStudent, which teaches teens the fundamental skills of app development. Through the program, teens gain fluency in multiple coding languages and learn to design, debug, and deploy their own apps. While this program has traditionally been hosted at the Michael and Karyn Lutz Center for After School Matters, the program has shifted to a remote format for the 2020 Summer Program Session.
Maintaining Kindergarten Readiness in Underserved Communities
The Carole Robertson Center for Learning was founded as an afterschool program, serving youth on the West Side of Chicago after the closure of their high school. Today the center serves over 1,000 children from birth to age 17 and their families. The center is one of the only organizations in Chicago that offers every early childhood service delivery model: center-based, a network of family childcare homes, home visiting, microcenters, and small partner sites.
Out-of-School Time with DeSports
The CME Group Foundation Computer Science grant provides crucial support for DePaul to pilot the DeSports program in the 2021 school year. Out-of-school time computer science programs help connect high school students’ passion for gaming to possibilities for their future education and careers in computer science and STEM fields.
Chicago Children’s Museum Playing with Numbers Initiative
Ramona Richards is the Education Programs Manager at the Chicago Children’s Museum. In her role, Ramona leads the Playing with Numbers initiative, which is a professional development series all about early math for kindergarten and first grade teachers in Chicago. In the wake of the current crisis, Ramona shared her key takeaways from pivoting to virtual content, and how they continued to build strong connections in a recent Linked In article.