Programs

The Background

During his life, the late Hymen Milgrom donated substantially towards improving urban education, most significantly through the Urban Teacher Education Program at the University of Chicago, a program that has since progressed to a large scale with federal funding. The Hymen Milgrom Supporting Organization (HMSO), created with a $17-million gift to the University of Chicago from the estate of Hymen T. Milgrom (AB, Accounting, ’35), was established to seek ways that public education can help urban children become more highly skilled and more successful as adults.

In service of this, the HMSO launched the Successful Pathways from School to Work initiative in 2013, which supports research that will help educators become more effective in fostering the skills, dispositions, and experiences essential for success in the modern labor market.

Building on the success of this initiative, in 2017 the HMSO  launched a Milgrom Community Service and Innovation Fellowship for University of Chicago students, focused on helping improve the lives of disadvantaged children and youth in Chicago through education-related community service.

In 2019, the HMSO launched the Milgrom Educational Innovation Challenge.   This initiative focuses on designing solutions to problems facing Chicago neighborhoods and communities by funding University of Chicago organizations to provide programming to University of Chicago students to work collaboratively with students from Chicago public middle schools and high schools high schools to generate entrepreneurial solutions to educational needs in local communities while building students’ academic, workplace and leadership skills with support from the grantee organization.

Moving in a new direction, in 2022 the HMSO initiated the Milgrom Computer Coding Fellowship. Beginning in the summer of 2022, this initiative focussed on helping improve the lives of underrepresented youth in Chicago and their opportunities for successful employment by developing their computer coding and programming skills. HMSO grants to University of Chicago organizations have enabled grantees to provide an opportunity to local high school students to learn to code.

Expanding on the Milgrom Computer Coding Fellowship, in 2023 the HMSO would like to continue to provide students with enrichment opportunities in STEM education, in computer science or other STEM areas. Our overarching goal is to provide students with meaningful STEM learning opportunities that will serve as a vehicle for successful pathways to employment. The Milgrom – UChicago Community Based STEM Program Grant is developing a collaborative STEM program that involves members of the University of Chicago and a community-based partner from the Southside community.