City to create 'Tech Corps' for laid-off professionals
Chicago will spend $20 million in proceeds from the parking meter lease to create its very own “Tech Corps” — by offering technology training and temporary city jobs to 10,500 laid-off professionals.
“There are a lot of people unemployed or who [have] lost their jobs — not just laid off. How do you get ’em back to the work force as quickly as possible?” Mayor Daley said Tuesday, after a “Technology Summit” at Microsoft’s Chicago headquarters.
“We want to create a pool . . . so any company looking [for] talent can come to Chicago and they can say, ‘I can beat Europe for 10, 15, 20, 30, 50 years because of the talent that is not only presently here and retrained, but also with the school system.’ There’s more and more talent coming out in technology.”
Chicago is already home to an estimated 350,000 information technology employees in such fields as data processing, management and technical consulting and Internet publishing.
The $20 million Tech Corps initiative is aimed at creating an even larger pool of trained technology professionals to bolster Chicago’s ability to attract information technology businesses.
Using $20 million from the “human infrastructure fund” created with proceeds from the $1.15 billion deal that privatized Chicago parking meters, the city expects to serve as many as 10,500 unemployed professionals.
In exchange for a $450 weekly stipend, they will be put to work for 30 hours a week in six-month jobs that benefit Chicago residents — either in the city, the public schools or non-profits. They will also receive 18 hours of technology training each week needed to reinvent themselves in the high-tech world.
The Tech Corps was the most intriguing of three technology initiatives that Daley is asking the private sector to support.
The second is the Chicago Academy for Advanced Technology, which opened this fall with a class of 150 high school freshmen, all “future leaders in technology,” according to Chicago Public Schools CEO Ron Huberman.
“We are going to learn how you integrate technology into the curriculum. . . . We can learn from this school and then take what we learn and implement that technology in all schools,” Huberman said.
Daley noted that many young people “know more about technology than most adults” — and they’re more intrigued by it, too.
“We have to really capture them in school. The old way of just throwing out the books and them sitting in the classroom — many times is not working. But, technology does work with a lot of students and we have to figure that out,” he said.
The final technology initiative is Dally plan to bridge the “digital divide” two years after pulling the plug on an $18.5 million wireless Internet access system that would have reached into Chicago’s poorest communities.
It calls for four impoverished neighborhoods — Englewood, Auburn Gresham, Chicago Lawn and Pilsen — to be declared “digital excellence demonstration communities” that will be flooded with technology to demonstrate the Internet’s “transformative power.”
Microsoft has agreed to donate $1.1 million worth of software to help 28 non-profit organizations in those neighborhoods. Another $2 million from Microsoft, the MacArthur Foundation, the Local Initiatives Support Corp. and the state will help bring Internet access to schools and public spaces.