With New Campaign, Grow Your Own-Illinois Expands Our Understanding of Teachers

By Ines Bellina

This past February, Grow Your Own Illinois launched its first multimedia recruitment and outreach campaign across the state with “We See the Teacher in You”. The campaign aims to inspire individuals from underrepresented communities to see their unique experience to become licensed teachers, regardless of their professional or academic background. While GYO-IL has historically implemented recruitment campaigns for its forgivable loan program, this new initiative seeks to increase the overall number of diverse teachers throughout the state—whether they become official GYO-IL candidates or not.

“The goal of the campaign is to ultimately increase enrollment in education licensure pathways for any individual in Illinois, particularly Black and Brown folks,” said Herman Reeves, Director of Teacher Marketing Recruitment at GYO-IL. “Our target audience for the campaign is paraprofessionals, career changers, and people who are school adjacent, from a parent to a crossing guard. But the campaign also seeks to change the narrative of how teaching and teacher education is understood in Illinois.” 

At the core of the campaign is the belief that the experiences of adults with diverse career paths offer valuable perspectives to the classroom. Their unique skills and backgrounds can motivate students, transform classrooms and help unify the community. 

To reach potential candidates, the campaign is airing spots on TV and radio and installing ads on public transit. It also includes a robust social media presence on Instagram, Facebook and other platforms. An essential component, though, is the participation of close to 50 community-based and higher education partners who are committed to distributing information to the people they serve in recruitment events and neighborhood spaces. 

“A big part of the campaign is to educate and to build the capacity of our partners,” explained Reeves. “We have different partners who we reset with individually to talk about what it means to be a teacher, what this campaign is about and what we're trying to do, and to help them proselytize about teaching and teacher education.”

GYO-IL provided all 50 institutions with customizable outreach kits. Each poster, palm card and tension banner in the kit has a QR code that directs interested individuals to the campaign’s landing page. There, prospective applicants will find information on the benefits of joining the teaching profession and hear real stories from people who took the plunge with the support of GYO. Additionally, they can fill out an inquiry form that will match them with an advisor who can guide them through the process of obtaining a teaching license and provide information on available scholarships and financial aid. 

Plans for the campaign were initially conceived through GYO-IL’s two Professional Learning Communities or PLCs, for short. GYO-IL has run a Dean’s PLC for four years, and a Community College, PLC for three years; both PLCs meet monthly to discuss strategies for increasing recruitment and retention among underrepresented candidates in teacher education. One of the strategies they wanted to collectively focus on was a recruitment marketing campaign. “There was widespread understanding among our Dean and Community College Leaders that recruitment efforts would be bolstered by a targeted marketing campaign for teacher education,” explains Liza Pappas, Executive Director of Grow Your Own-Illinois. To help them with their efforts, they hired the independent marketing communication and advertising firm, The Purple Group, which had experience working with similar statewide campaigns in Illinois.  

The campaign comes at a critical, but longstanding, juncture in teaching in Illinois. Since 2018, there has been a persistent teacher shortage in the state and across the nation. The latest data shows there are close to 4,000 unfilled teaching positions, with special education and bilingual teaching positions being some of the most heavily impacted. Teachers are also disproportionately white and female. While 16.5% percent of Illinois students are Black, only 6% of educators are. Similarly, while about 28% of the student population identifies as Hispanic, only close to 9% of teachers do as well. 

“The work of the organization is always pivotal and important,” said Reeves. “One reason we wanted to do this work now is because of the teacher shortage, but it’s also vital because we know we need more teachers of color in schools. It's been that way when we launched the campaign and it's been that way for the last 20 years. It's been important for our work to continue to push toward decreasing those gaps. The campaign allows us to do that more aggressively.” 

While any campaign will have a certain goal in mind when it comes to metrics, hits, and leads, GYO-IL holds a more holistic vision of success. In addition to finding candidates for their loan program, they want to empower potential students to pursue a new professional path even if their starting point looks different than that of traditional college students. “Ultimately,” Reeves said, “success means increasing the population of diverse enrollees in our programs and our partners’ programs.”

To learn more about the campaign, visit the dedicated webpage.