NICI Grantee Spotlight: YWCA Northwestern Illinois
February 15, 2024
Kris L. Machajewski is the CEO of the YWCA Northwestern Illinois, which services six counties in the region: Boone, Winnebago, Stephenson, Jo Daviess, Ogle, and McHenry. When Kris first came on as CEO, programs were primarily focused on childcare services. Through adapting to the unique needs of the region while championing the YWCA’s larger mission of eliminating racism and empowering women, the YWCA Northwestern Illinois has grown into a significant driver of workforce development in the region, expanding to include literacy and immigrant services through acquisitions such as La Voz Latina and The Literacy Council to provide holistic, wraparound services to families in both rural and urban communities.
The YWCA Northwestern Illinois is now in the second year of the YW TechLab program which provides workforce training in the IT sector. The YW TechLab provides direct pathways to employment for women and BIPOC communities who are underrepresented in the field, and through grant support from Northern Illinois Community Initiatives (NICI), the YWCA Northwestern Illinois has been able to supply students with stipends to help eliminate barriers students face in completing the program.
Kris spoke with NICI to discuss how the YWCA Northwestern Illinois meets the needs of the region, how the organization has grown over time, and how the YW TechLab is establishing a foundation of economic mobility in northwestern Illinois.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
1. How does the YWCA Northwestern Illinois carry out the larger organization's mission?
YWCA Northwestern Illinois maintains a laser focus to ensure that we provide holistic, wrap-around services that move women, people of color, and families to states of economic empowerment and stability. Because we take a holistic approach to the way that we are serving our community, we can stabilize an entire family in all the ways that it takes to stabilize a family, whether it’s mental health, parenting support, helping them receive services that they quality for, or workforce development training so that they can get a job that pays a living wage. And then all of the barriers in between.
I’ve shared our Impact Statement: With a focus on Northern Illinois, economically disadvantaged and over-burdened women, children and families, especially those impacted by the traumas of violence, racism, and language and cultural barriers, achieve safety and stability with essential resources. Women and their families progressively achieve economic self-sufficiency with the ultimate goal of achieving economic and personal empowerment through the ability to afford childcare, business ownership, improvement of literacy and other career strategies.
This impact statement is something that we’ve revisited regularly, and it drives our growth as well as the programming we choose to provide at the YWCA Northwestern Illinois. We measure success by the number of women, people of color, and families moving out of situations of crisis and instability; those achieving literacy and family-supporting employment; and those starting and developing quality childcare businesses.
2. What are the unique needs of the Northwestern Illinois region, and how does the organization work to understand and meet those needs?
The northwestern region of Illinois is interesting. Parts of it are very rural, and parts of it are more urban — so you have areas like the city of Rockford that are much denser in population and socioeconomic needs. But whenever you look at far northwestern Illinois, it's much more rural. And the needs are different. The needs change.
One of the challenges we have had over the past 10 to 15 years is there has been a mass exodus of corporate headquarters located in northwestern Illinois. The challenge that presents is that there are reduced philanthropic dollars in this community. It makes a nonprofit have to be very progressive, I would say, in looking at how they do business and how they grow.
I think there is a misconception whenever you're looking at our rural counties that it is predominantly white. And whereas it may be predominantly white, there are definitely pockets of immigrants and people of color. There is especially a high Latino population within the farming communities. What makes it challenging for them to get services is that they are very rural. And there aren't a lot of services out in those areas, which is why after trying for a number of years we've just succeeded in opening an office in Stephenson County so that if you're in the far reaches of Northwestern Illinois, you are still able to access services without having to drive two hours into Rockford.
3. How has Northern Illinois Community Initiatives (NICI)'s support empowered the organization's work?
I think that having NICI’s support has given credibility to the YW TechLab and validates the needs that we saw when we developed this program. This program has been running only 18 months — we're already seeing successes with it, it's already beginning to do what we had planned on it doing. But I think what I loved about interacting with NICI from the beginning was that they truly wanted to get to know us and they truly wanted to get to know our program. It's one thing to be able to write a grant and tell them about the YW TechLab, but whenever they ask to come out and see it, it takes their understanding to a whole nother level.
NICI truly understood the barriers that we were trying to work our students through. This isn't like a normal workforce development program where you may be able to move, you know, hundreds of people through. This is an information and technology cohort that has 700+ training hours for people to go through. It provides them with different on and off ramps to get certifications, and then we pair that with a paid internship and job placement.
It’s challenging for a lot of people to get through the YW TechLab because first of all, they might not have any background in information and technology. But they also have barriers that you may not even realize exist: There might be barriers to childcare, there may be income challenges, they might not have the appropriate ID, they may not be able to get to class every day, or they might not be able to afford internet to be able to do a job search or to be able to do the homework. There are all sorts of barriers whenever you have people who have been living in poverty. When NICI came in and we were sharing this with them, they got it.
The difference between our first cohort that had no stipend and then the second cohort that we ran with the stipend that we were able to pay from NICI support — It was amazing the number that ended up being able to finish. We had so many students drop out of the first cohort because they just needed money to pay just some of their basic necessities. When we were able to give them the stipend, it doubled the amount of students who were staying in and graduating.
4. How do workforce development programs such as the YW Tech Lab foster economic mobility in the region?
Workforce Development is a critical area in the Rockford metropolitan area. I sit on the Workforce Investment Board, and workforce development is really one of the primary drivers because we have some large employers that are starting to open. They're all searching for employees who have some foundation of IT knowledge but also who have basic work skills.
So if we're able to bring someone in and we build up their literacy levels, if we're able to teach them a skill that they can earn a living wage with, all of that goes into improving the workforce in this community. It's vital that we're making sure that we are building a population of workforce, and that is going to take immigrants. It is going to take immigrants who we can help through language and cultural barriers, and get them a living wage.
We have a success story of a young woman who moved here from the Philippines. She had an IT degree in the Philippines, but when she came to the United States, she could not get a job because she struggled with the language. So we pulled her into the program, and through the training, taught her the language of how we talk IT and the wording that we use in the English language. When she finished the training, we placed her in a paid internship with one of our employment partners and they hired her at the end of her internship.
The biggest barrier that she had was she could never make it through an interview, and being in this program bypassed that interview process. It gave her a nontraditional route to that employer, and it gave the employer the opportunity to see what a great, skillful employee she was. If she had not gone through this program, it's pretty certain she would never have gotten hired by that company.