_ The Foundations of East Chicago is taking the lead on making East Chicago a better community with the launch of the Greenhouse Fellowship. Graduates for Central High School in East Chicago
will be selected and given full time positions within the program. This will be done to produce better residents with training to build a brighter East Chicago. Each graduate will be assigned a particular nonprofit and meet with the other fellows to discuss lessons learned, and develop new ideas to improve East Chicago. The fellows will survey the communities, diagnose problems, and find areas of concern. With this they will be tasked starting early 2015 to implement a plan and provide a foundation for a new renaissance within the area. The fellows will begin work in September 2014.
_ Each year 10 new fellows will be selected from
Central High School. Rather than traditional standards of hiring and recruitment, these graduates will be selected based on special skills and natural gifts in imagination, resiliency, sociability, and optimism rather than grades, test scores and other factors.
_ The Greenhouse Fellowship was created because we can’t afford to wait any longer in revitalizing our communities. More and more, populations are becoming more cynical of traditional organizations and this fellowship is hoped to fill that void they have left by providing new community leadership with minimal ties to the existing regional powers. By refining the natural talents of today’s youth and putting them to work within communities, it is hoped to revitalize how America views its cities. That begins here, in East Chicago.
