by Adriana Rakshana
As part of TechTeam’s goal to support local organizations, over the Fall and Winter Quarter it has partnered with Safe Schools, an organization that focuses on supporting LGBTQ youth throughout Illinois. The Illinois Safe Schools Alliance envisions a world in which youth can develop into their fullest potential, learn in safe and nurturing schools, and live in communities that accept and honor differences, where everyone has the freedom to express their sexual orientation and gender identity. Eric Kim and his TechTeam cohort are working towards redesigning their website and integrating social media into Safe School’s digital strategy. The target audience is high school students and youth all over the state.
Apart from the overall goal towards improving the website for The Illinois Safe Schools Alliance, Eric is working towards teaching his cohort the use of HTML, CSS and Squarespace, different tools that aid in website development. The two-track approach helps the students learn the concepts and to apply them to community development in the non-profit and social sector.
TechTeam has identified that the main issue is an expert built website, that is not quite user-friendly. Thus, Safe Schools is not able to maintain and update the website as easily as they would like. TechTeam hopes to build a new design for the website to increase functionality and accessibility over a prolonged period of time. TechTeam also plans to create a forum for students to interact in, as well as make certain sensitive content password protected. We are working towards fulfilling The Safe Schools Alliance’s wishes to increase awareness of the resources they offer as well as the ability to contribute to their efforts through donations or other involvement. TechTeam hopes to have the project completed by March or April in time for Safe School’s Tenth Anniversary.