South Cook News

The Saving Lives Improvement Project is setting up a workforce development project in the south suburbs tandem with Catalyst Consulting Group LLC.  

"I'm excited about that opportunity," Lathea Smyles, founder of the program, told South Cook News. "It gives us a chance to bring some well-deserved programming to the south suburbs."

The Saving Lives Improvement Project consists of three phases.

Lathea Smyles, Saving Lives Improvement Project founder | Facebook

"It’s a training component," Smyles said. "It's mostly it's the umbrella youth development and violence prevention and it encompasses multiple elements of aquaponics. We're looking to kind of take that in and bridge that with our urban farming piece."

The aquaponics program will run in tandem with an aquaponics farm development eyeing a portion of the Calumet Country Club.

Smyles already hosts job training programs elsewhere.

"We give them soft skills and then we transition them into full-blown, hands-on apprenticeship-style placements in those specific disciplines," she said.

One program in particular trains those in need of job skills on how to fly drones. As part of the program, participants become licensed by the Federal Aviation Administration.

"We're training them in the trade is a strong career path from where they will actually, by the end of 12 weeks, they will be licensed with their commercial license -- the FAA part 107 license -- to actually become a drone pilot," Smyles said. "We discovered over the last summer that some of the things that we could do to kind of help sustain our communities and infuse them with technology and being compared to competitor for the future."

The redevelopment of the Calumet Country Club poses an opportunity for more such job-oriented youth programming in the south suburbs.

"It would be a no-brainer to me to incorporate some of the programing out there basis there," Smyles said. "We can introduce the kids to golf, expand their horizons blossoming and serve the surrounding south suburbs … and then I grew up in the south suburbs."