Chance the Rapper continued his push to provide funding to local schools with a massive new donation from one of the world’s biggest tech companies.
At Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Paideia Academy on the city’s South Side, Chance announced grants totaling $1.5 million from tech giant Google. $1 million of that money will go to SocialWorks, Chance’s non-profit organization, and $500,000 will go to the Children First Fund, which will support computer science programming at Chicago Public schools.
The money will be used to support computer science and arts programs for kids in Chicago Public Schools, according to a press release from Google, and the classes will be used to teach children technical skills for the future.
Chance surprised students at the school with the gift, and those kids participated in a Google coding workshop, dedicated to showing students how exciting and relevant coding is to their lives.
“The research says that 65 percent of grade school kids are going to be working in careers that don’t exist today,” Google.Org Principal Justin Steele said. “We don’t know exactly what those jobs will look like, but we know the skills they will learn through coding, like critical thinking and creative problem solving are going to be critical for the future.”
The money will be put towards CPS’ goal of bringing computer science classes to all schools from kindergarten to 12th grade within the next 10 years.
