Reflections from a Summer Spent with CLX

This summer, I was placed at the Chicago Learning Exchange through a fellowship hosted by New Sector Alliance, a nonprofit that provides consulting and leadership development services to accelerate social change by strengthening organizations and developing leaders that seek to change the world in positive ways.

As a New Sector Fellow, I spent this summer becoming more acclimated with the public sector and using my placement at CLX to increase their capacity to process data and effectively administer the LRNG platform in Chicago through a partnership with the City of Chicago’s One Summer Chicago (OSC) program, the second-largest youth employment program in the country. Throughout the summer, I assisted city agencies such as the Department of Family Support Service (DFSS), Chicago Housing Authority (CHA), and other partners in on-boarding youth to LRNG. I helped them get a better grasp of the platform’s data, so that they could ensure that their youth were completing playlists and earning digital badges.

As my time at CLX comes to an end this month, I can’t express how grateful I am to have had this unique experience to wear several different hats in an internal capacity and as an intermediary contact between a national nonprofit platform like LRNG, the City of Chicago, and a large number of community-based organizations.

Whether I was generating playlist progress reports to let agencies know which badges their youth had completed, writing internal reports for CLX to understand how effectively partner agencies were integrating digital badging, contacting LRNG with technical questions and issues, or adjusting LRNG groups to reflect each site’s actual rosters, I not only enjoyed the work I was doing, but I also honed soft skills such as communication while gaining technical expertise in Microsoft Excel and Salesforce. These are skills that I will take beyond CLX and apply to my own career development.

Additionally, I have had the privilege to see how the One Summer Chicago and Chicagobility playlists have pushed youth to reflect upon their own career development and provided both a direction and opportunity for youth to grow as a result. While I believe that some of my work at CLX will have a lasting impact on the organization, I know that working with One Summer Chicago and Chicagobility has had a lasting impact on me, providing me with hope that we can one day close the opportunity gap.