Hawk Talk: Leveraging Community Engagement to be an Economic Engine

Join speaker Lester McCarroll Jr. as he discusses ways that students and recent grads can become more engaged in their local communities and build stronger job opportunities for themselves and their neighbors. Lester is a managing director of the Mid South Business Association and Resource Center (MSBARC) in Chicago and has helped to implement a bottom -up, data driven model for economic development in Chicago's Bronzeville neighborhood. Lester enjoyed a 20 year career at AT&T Bell Laboratories and Motorola, where he rose to Vice President, and received Electrical Engineering degrees from the Illinois Institute of Technology in 1983 and Stanford University in 1984. Lester has led and developed programs as a member of the 100 Black Men of Chicago, the Leadership Advisory Committee of the Art Institute of Chicago, the YMCA’s Achievers Program and Southside/Wabash Board, and the National Consortium for Graduate Degrees for Minorities in Engineering and Science.