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Illinois Manufacturing Foundation
Chicago, Illinois
Multimedia
1 project

Posted
Member since 2016-05-25

This session is currently inactive, and cannot accept applications at this time.

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Session Overview

We would like to make use of social media in attracting unemployed and underemployed individuals to our training programs.

Nonprofit Overview

IMF is a 35+ year old, not-for-profit vocational school that serves two markets. It helps the hard-to-employ (those lacking a high school diploma, ex-offenders, older workers whose skills are no longer needed, etc.) develop skills that allow them to get hired for hard to fill positions. The jobs IMF trains people for pay decent wages and offer potential for career growth. Most of the students are either black or Hispanic. The second IMF market is the employers, many of them small firms, which have positions that are hard to fill. By developing a clear set of skills that these companies need their entry-level employees to possess and training them while also providing instruction on good work habits, IMF provides a rare source of needed skills.
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. IMF serves these markets well. Dropout rates are low and include those who are hired away by skills-hungry employers before they complete the program. IMF has an enviable history of placing its graduates in jobs related to their training. For example, through the last recession, when jobs were scarce, IMF was able to place over 70% of the graduates of a machining program it runs at the Illinois Department of Corrections Sheridan facility in Sheridan, Illinois. All of the participants in this program are inmates who are newly released from prison when they begin their job searches. Note that all student tuitions are paid through government grants or other sources, which means that students aren’t saddled with education debts when they graduate.
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. It is because the quality of its services has never faltered that IMF has been able to survive its financial crisis, which I will describe below, when so many other schools, especially the for-profit ones, failed and closed. By serving its two markets so well, it also helps government and society by
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• Enabling people who live at least in part at government expense become taxpayers.
• Helping employers obtain the skills they need to thrive and compete from the Chicago area and so helping to boost the local economy.

Skills

Communications
Photography
Copy writing
Videography