The YTC club at ETHS is a chapter of Youth Technology Corps — and the best way to understand this club is to understand the idea it carries: students teach students, and the students they teach become the next teachers.
Youth Technology Corps was founded in 1998 at Morton East High School in Cicero, Illinois, on a simple observation: the best person to teach a teenager is often another teenager who just learned the thing themselves. Students learned to refurbish computers and build robots — then taught the next students, who taught the next.
The idea traveled. It crossed into Mexico and grew into a partnership now twenty-eight years old, built trip by trip — including a U.S. Embassy Mexico City grant of $49,705 that expanded the program from 2 schools to 8 sites in fifteen months. It crossed the Atlantic through educators from the U.S. State Department's fellowship programs, who trained with YTC and took the model home to countries across Africa — no staff hired, no office opened, just teachers teaching teachers. Today the network spans the United States, Mexico, and Africa, with partnerships including the U.S. Department of State and IREX.
And in 2009, it arrived in Evanston.
The Evanston club took the model and ran: labs for its own city's seniors, machines for its shelters, mentoring for its middle-schoolers. When Katrina hit, six members went to New Orleans and launched two clubs. And from 2009 on, ETHS students became the teaching engine of YTC's African Initiative — mentoring peers in Ethiopia, Namibia, and Mozambique, and in 2025, flying there to teach in person.
Within the network, that makes Evanston a flagship: the chapter other communities look at to see what the model produces when a city gets behind it.
The curriculum, the leadership pathway, the refurbisher certification, the competitions, the international network, and the standards every chapter shares.
The students, the service, the local partners, and seventeen years of student leaders handing the club to the next generation.
A model that crosses borders because students carry it — from Cicero to Evanston to Durango to Windhoek, one taught lesson at a time.
It stays alive one way: a student walks in the door and picks up a screwdriver.
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