Math Motivators Featured in the News

When I was hired as the Math Motivators Program Coordinator for Chicago back in 2019, one of my initial objectives was to add more schools to expand our reach to Chicago students. As I began to determine the best way to effectively connect with schools, I noticed an advertisement for Communities in Schools-Chicago at a bus stop. After investigating their website and learning about the work they were doing connecting their 200 school partners to 170 community organizations, we submitted an application to become a community partner.

Once approved, we almost immediately received requests from schools and were able to add one CIS school partner quickly. During the last three years, we have helped six CIS-Chicago school partners with tutoring through site partnerships, had a few more that promoted our Virtual Tutoring Center, and have a wait list of two to three others that would like to bring Math Motivators to their schools. CIS-Chicago not only provides help in connecting us to schools, but they also provide support for our organization by providing training sessions, networking events, resources and guidance.

On August 9, CIS-Chicago hosted their annual Summer Institute—a day of networking and building new skills with fellow community partners and accessing tools and resources—at the University of Illinois-Chicago. A week before the event, I received an email from the CIS-Chicago Associate Director of Community Partnerships indicating that their public relations team had been contacting the media to promote the CIS Partnership Program, and some reporters may be interested in learning about our organization’s role in schools. I felt very nervous about the prospect of speaking with reporters, but I realized how difficult it can be to get an opportunity like this.

It turns out that The Actuarial Foundation and one other organization were the only two community partners selected to be part of the interview, the focus of which was on the Summer Institute and all the fantastic work that CIS-Chicago is doing for Chicago students with the help of community partners. I was asked to sit down with the CBS-2 Chicago news reporter for a brief video interview. Watch the video from CBS-2 Chicago below!

Math Motivators began in February 2016, when our founder, Barry Jacobson, and 13 actuarial science students from the University of Connecticut provided free SAT math tutoring to 25 students at Achievement First High School in Hartford. To date, Math Motivators has provided free, high-quality math tutoring to over 4,000 students who need and want tutoring but do not otherwise have access to affordable tutoring. To learn more about the program, please visit mathmotivators.org.