The Pritzker family is donating $10 million to a University of Illinois innovation center that they say will help foster more diverse tech talent in Illinois.
The donation, being made to The Discovery Partners Institute over the next five years from the Pritzker Foundation, will establish the Pritzker Tech Talent Labs. The idea is to launch new programs aimed at helping thousands of women and people of color secure high-paying tech jobs.
U of I’s Discovery Partners Institute is a network of research and innovation hubs at The 78 real estate project in the South Loop. The Institute is designed to connect faculty and students at U of I’s main campus in Champaign-Urbana to the tech and innovation scene in Chicago.
With the creation of the Pritzker Tech Talent Labs at the Institute, two new programs are launching. The first is an instructional program for high schoolers that teaches them how to code and then connects them with internship, mentorship and financial resources. The second program aims to provide educational resources to the current workforce on concepts like machine learning, artificial intelligence and 5G.
The Pritzker Foundation is led by Tom Pritzker, Nick Pritzker, Gigi Pritzker Pucker and Penny Pritzker.
Renderings of the Pritzker Tech Talent Labs at DPI
Through the new programs, the Pritzker Tech Talent Labs aims to help 7,000 people annually secure jobs by 2029 and address racial disparities in Chicago’s tech scene. According to data from the Institute, Black and Hispanic people make up just 12% of the city’s tech workforce.
Omowale Casselle will lead the Tech Talent Labs. He was most recently the co-founder and CEO of Digital Adventures Inc., which focuses on technology education.
The Pritzker family has long been involved and invested in Chicago’s tech economy. The family owns and operates Pritzker Group Venture Capital, which has backed local startups, such as Cameo, Catalytic and Project44. Governor J.B. Pritzker was a co-founder of 1871, Chicago’s largest tech and startup incubator, and earlier this year released $500 million in state funding to support the Illinois Innovation Network and Discovery Partners Institute. Additionally, Penny Pritzker is a co-founder of P33, an ambitious private sector initiative to grow Chicago’s tech economy that’s also working with the new Tech Talent Labs initiative.
“Covid-19 has worsened our already significant income inequality, accelerated tech adoption and made the need for upskilling even more acute,” said Penny Pritzker, former U.S. Secretary of Commerce and trustee of the Pritzker Foundation, in a statement. “We simply must do more to help our workers, particularly women and people of color, acquire the skills needed to adapt and thrive given the accelerating impact of automation and digitization.”
