In April, amid an escalating COVID-19 crisis and just a month before George Floyd’s death sparked a social justice reckoning, two student teams began work on Harris Policy Labs projects for two long-standing Chicago nonprofits: the Chicago Urban League (CUL) and The Chicago Community Trust (the Trust).
Putting theory into practice, Harris Policy Labs are elective courses designed to move students from the classroom to the center of public policy arenas. These particular spring quarter 2020 projects involved developing new revenue strategies for CUL and crafting ways for the Trust to benchmark progress in closing the region’s racial and ethnic wealth gap.
"We view the Policy Labs program as one that provides meaningful and real opportunities for students to touch real-world problems for real clients who have urgent, challenging problems,” said Paula R. Worthington, the academic director of the Policy Labs program and a senior lecturer at Harris.
Like others before them, both spring labs focused on issues affecting “the most disadvantaged and most vulnerable members of our communities,” Worthington said.
But unlike others, COVID-19 forced all work to be done remotely. It also delayed the quarter’s start, cutting the usual 10-week classes to about eight weeks.
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BY CRISTI KEMPF
