Generating Collective Knowledge through Chess

What do Ascension Health Systems, St Louis Chess Club and Chess Without Borders have in common? They are all committed to bringing cultural understanding and educational opportunities through chess to children in need. Chess Without Borders has brought artistic, social, economic, cultural and educational values to the community through chess, and its award winning youth continue to create more humanitarian projects locally and worldwide. This unique partnership between organizations will launch a chess program at Sunny Hill Elementary School in Carpentersville and The Boys and Girls Club of Dundee, IL for the upcoming school year. Dr.Armendariz-Maxwell, Principal of Sunny Hill Elementary School - Barrington 220, is delighted to start this program at her school.

For information about the chess program please Visit http://shulmanchess.com/biogra... to learn about its achievements.

The story of how Alexian Brothers and the Barrington Chess Program collaborated is strange, but it demonstrates how intellectual curiosity and imagination can create magic. Several years ago a teenager, Rishi Sethi, (the founder of the Barrington Chess Program), was struggling to involve schools to host chess tournaments. He then met Vice President of Alexian Brothers, Mr. Mark Majkowski, a chess player. Mark had learned chess as a teenager at the back of a liquor store in Detroit. “There were very few opportunities then for anyone who wanted to learn chess” said Mark. Rishi asked Mark if Alexian Brothers would sponsor a chess tournament at their hospitals since Rishi had no place to run tournaments.The Barrington chess program was growing rapidly and 100 chess players and their families registered to play in a tournament. Alexian Brothers agreed to host one of the first chess tournaments in the area at St Alexis Hospital in Hoffman Estates. Their support gave birth to a movement thanks to the enterprise and creativity of Mr Majkowski at Alexian Brothers and a group of teenagers with Rishi Sethi who ran the chess tournament in 2005.

Today Chess Without Borders combines chess education with service and philanthropy and is run by 2008 US Chess Champion GM Yury Shulman. Several youths have won Presidential Awards for service and have volunteered over 100,000 hours since its inception in 1999. They have donated over $135,000 and have thousands of chess players actively engaged in the program. Visit: http://www.chesswob.org/.

As Chess Without Borders aspires to be more innovative and evidence-based, it will assess the cognitive and social impact of running the chess program for a year on students at Sunny Hill School in Carpentersville. Thanks to the generosity of Ascension Health who will sponsor the program, this assessment will provide data to assess the value of chess as a tool for promoting educational excellence among students. Presidential Service Youth volunteers Nabeel Rasheed, Sophia Cai, Stephen Zhu, Jane and Jack Bradley, Ethan Gagliano, Pratkhik Kandimalla, Arnav Batta, Duniya Diyadawagamage and Ayushi Shah will serve as leaders to launch additional artistic, technology, photography and videography projects to complement this program as they have done in the past. Community leaders Zein Bertacchi and Dawn Moeller will supervise the students. Since the inception of the chess program youth have created unusual projects through collaboration from starting a chess club at a Syrian Refuge center in Jordan to raising funds for flood victims in Southern IL and Albinos of Tanzania.

Watch this short video to see the impact Service has had on youth through the chess program:

GM Shulman, volunteers and teachers will run the chess program at Sunny Hill School. The curriculum will follow the textbook Chess! Lessons from a Grandmaster. This enables a methodical and measurable approach to mastering the basic fundamentals of chess. Students are also encouraged to participate in US Chess Federated tournaments to establish a national rating in chess that in turn drives them to work hard to get better.

The book is available through Amazon or on the iPad.https://www.amazon.com/Chess-Grandmaster-GM-Yury-Shulman/dp/0984573453/.

A special thank you to Ascension Health for this remarkable opportunity that engages students from all walks of life and teaches tolerance, understanding, motivation and reaching for excellence through the magnificent game of chess!

If any community member would like to volunteer for the program, please email Kiran at chesswob@gmail.com.

The program will run on Thursday after school at Sunny Hill School starting in Oct 2017