WHAT WE DO
Grow Your Own Illinois (GYO-IL) recruits, supports, and prepares individuals from underrepresented communities to become and thrive as licensed teachers. We envision an Illinois teacher workforce that reflects the rich racial and cultural diversity of its students and is rooted in their communities. To achieve this, we provide candidates with financial and academic assistance, social-emotional supports, and culturally sustaining professional development. Our teachers—and the students, schools, and neighborhoods they serve—are all strengthened by this process.
Our Mission
GYO-IL’s mission is to support racially diverse and community-connected individuals to become certified teachers in hard-to-staff schools and positions in order to improve the educational opportunities and outcomes for their students.
Deep Local Roots
Grow Your Own Illinois evolved from the work of two separate grassroots organizations in Chicago recruiting teachers for their understaffed local schools.
Palenque LSNA (previously Logan Square Neighborhood Association) was training parents, mainly Black and Latina mothers in classroom leadership roles and Action Now was dealing with the high rate of turnover among teachers without local connections to their neighborhood schools.
When Action Now leaders heard about LSNA’s efforts to pipeline parent-mentors into active teachers, the idea of “growing” local educators with neighborhood roots spread.
Building Power
Joining forces in 2004, LSNA and Action Now campaigned vigorously, along with six other grassroots community organizations, to establish the Grow Your Own Teacher Education Act.
The Act passed in 2005, and by 2006, GYO had won a $1.5 million state planning grant. Within a year, legislators had allocated another $3 million to launch the program. Monies were dispersed strategically to “consortia”: collaborations of community groups, school districts, and universities across Illinois.
Once funded, the organization established itself as Grow Your Own Illinois. The nonprofit was then selected by the Illinois State Board of Education to develop the initiative as a statewide effort. In Fiscal Year 2011, the Illinois Board of Higher Education took over the administration of GYO-IL.
From Setbacks to Success
After years of successful recruitment, GYO-IL had built partnerships with 16 consortia sites across the state. In addition to eight in Chicago, programs were also initiated in Alton, Carbondale, East St. Louis, Peoria, the Quad Cities, Rockford, Springfield, and Chicago’s south suburbs.
However, state funding was inconsistent. Additionally, the Illinois budget impasse had disastrous implications for many nonprofits, including GYO-IL. During the two-year budget crisis, GYO-IL was forced to shutter all programs, except those in Chicago.
By 2018, funding began to be restored, and the organization centralized its Chicago consortia. At the start of Fiscal Year 2020, GYO-IL was named the administrator of the state’s GYO teachers grant program for the first time since its inception.
GYO-IL now proudly provides grants to seven consortia programs. In the past five fiscal years (FY2020-2025), GYO-IL programs have graduated 300 licensed classroom teachers.