Chess Without Borders

The plan is to organize an educational chess workshop with the US Open Chess Grandmaster Yury Shulman for inner city Chicago students. The other teenage chess volunteers with me will execute, implement and assist Grandmaster Shulman as he conducts the workshop. The workshop is open to approximately 100 students from the inner city schools in Chicago who would never have the opportunity to study with a world-class chess grandmaster. Chess offers a unique method of learning math, problem solving, and concentration while building emotional and cognitive intellectual skills. Grandmaster Shulman was trained in the former Soviet Union, which had developed a systematic method of teaching chess. GM Shulman brings these training methods to Illinois as he teaches in Barrington at the Yury Shulman Chess School. I am the founder of the Barrington Chess Program and together with other volunteers we developed a chess program, which combines learning chess with service and philanthropy. I founded this program in 1998 because I was the only one playing chess in my school and today every school in my District 220 has a chess club. I thought of combining learning chess with service and philanthropy. I am a certified Chess Tournament Director and along with me other teenagers direct chess tournaments in the area. The program was so unusual that it attracted the attention of GM Shulman who moved to the area and adopted the program bringing the excellence of teaching methods yet maintaining its service component. The Barrington Chess Program has won 2 Governor’s Awards for our volunteering and I have won the Prudential Spirit of Community Award, Presidential Freedom Scholarship Award and US News and AXA Scholarship Award for founding and organizing the chess program. Although we try hard to volunteer and serve underprivileged schools by doing book drives and providing free lessons we are still limited in our ability to reach out to more inner city schools. This grant will allow us to provide material, supplies and pay for lessons for about 100 students. It will also allow the volunteer students from the Yury Shulman Chess School to demonstrate leadership skills in teaching and organizing a prestigious summer camp. There are other cultural, economic and social benefits of working together for both the giver and receiver. The creativity and diversity of the chess program motivates students to push themselves to do better. Children love tournaments and enjoy competing. Even after losing they are resilient and always try at the next tournament. The leadership opportunities, which are, possible with service through chess gives students a structure to be in charge. For example at this chess camp the students will be divided into groups supervised by teenage chess assistants who will provide individual attention in small groups. The students will rotate so that every group will have access to learning from GM Shulman. We hope to distribute material which will reinforce the lessons learned. There will also be support services available through GM Shulman for students who want to ask questions as they continue to study or would like to enter in our tournaments at no charge during the school year.