Nonprofit Providing Employment Resources Plans To Open New South Side Location

Skills for Chicagoland’s Future recently announced that they will expand to the south side by opening a new office to better serve the needs of unemployed and underemployed residents. Photo Credit: Provided by Skills for Chicagoland’s Future.
Skills for Chicagoland’s Future recently announced that they will expand to the south side by opening a new office to better serve the needs of unemployed and underemployed residents. Photo Credit: Provided by Skills for Chicagoland’s Future.

Nonprofit Providing Employment Resources Plans To Open New South Side Location

BY KATHERINE NEWMAN

Skills for Chicagoland’s Future (Skills), a nonprofit organization working to connect unemployed and underemployed Chicagoans with sustainable job opportunities, recently announced plans to open a physical location on the south side of Chicago. The new location is set to open next year and the organization hopes that the expansion will remove some of the barriers that individuals face when it comes to accessing the resources that they provide.

Skills is a nonprofit organization in Chicago that works with employers to meet their hiring needs by placing qualified candidates who were previously unemployed or underemployed into open positions that are a good fit for them.

The organization’s expansion to the south side was a strategic move to better serve clients and remove the obstacle of having to travel to the organization’s main office in The Loop to connect with the services they provide.

“We will retain our presence in The Loop, but as a business intermediary one thing that we wanted to do was be intentional about increasing our community partnerships and collaboration,” said Ayom Siengo, vice president of Community and Strategic Partnerships at Skills for Chicagoland’s Future. “We know that folks go through a lot to get from their neighborhoods to Skills downtown and what we wanted to do was ensure that we can make our supports much more accessible to the people that are utilizing our services.”

The new south side location is Skills’ first permanent expansion in Chicago and it will be a place where Skills’ facilitators will work hand-in-hand with community residents and organizations to source, screen, and refer south side candidates to Chicago employers.

While Skills works to place individuals into appropriate job opportunities, the organization acknowledges that many community-based organizations are already doing this work on the south side and they are looking forward to supporting and sharing resources with them.

“We would argue that existing practitioners, those that are already embedded in these neighborhoods, can or could utilize the support of Skills as being the business intermediary. We first respond to demand from the corporate sector and then go on to be a good steward and a good partner to our community-based organizations who are on the ground. We want to compliment the basket of supports and services that they offer. It’s not just the job seeker that can access our resources, it is now also increasingly more community-based organizations that will have a better position to partner with Skills,” said Siengo.

Just in 2018, Skills placed 719 south side job seekers in new employment opportunities which makes up over 50 percent of Skills’ total placements that year, according to information provided by Skills.

“Physical convenience is actually a pretty significant factor in this expansion,” said Siengo. “We have been able to track which neighborhoods we are impacting the most and we do have some pretty good data on the fact that a lot of folks from the south and west sides are being impacted and we don’t take it lightly that people are traveling to Skills for support.”

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