On the Fired Up Podcast, hosts Dr. Pete Bavis and Patrick Hughes sit down with STEAMe Founder & CEO Rachel Kohler and Co-Founder & Chief Systems Officer Dr. Nichole Pinkard to talk about how STEAMe powered the All Evanston Hiring Hub, a cross-community workforce initiative that will connect residents completing sector- or occupation-based training to employment through the Ryan Family Foundation Workforce Development Initiative.
Nichole Pinkard's tie to the city goes back decades, to a summer LEAD program at Northwestern that first exposed her to the gap between opportunity and reality. She stayed connected to Evanston through her faculty role at Northwestern's School of Education and Social Policy, later joining the Evanston school board and co-founding STEAMe, bringing systems-design thinking to the same community that shaped her.
Before STEAMe, Rachel Kohler was CEO of NowPow, a social care referral platform that connected health systems, patients, and community organizations to manage referrals at scale. She is now applying that same model of building multi-sided technology for a fragmented system to workforce development. At NowPow, the goal was to put people on pathways to better health. Today, STEAMe helps workforce initiatives put people on pathways to greater wealth.
The All Evanston Hiring Hub is a three-year demonstration launched by Northwestern and STEAMe, funded by the Ryan Family Foundation, connecting Youth Job Center, Evanston Own It, The Trade Collective, National Louis University, and Per Scholas into one shared hiring system. Northwestern acts as the anchor institution, convening partners and overseeing job placement and outcome measurement, while STEAMe supplies the underlying data and digital infrastructure.
Rather than asking learners and families to trust an abstract path, STEAMe’s job portal helps workforce initiatives work backward from the destination—showing the real job and real pay before training even begins. Watch the podcast to learn how a first-generation family became comfortable with their son’s decision to pursue a career in the trades instead of attending college.
STEAMe's workforce intelligence runs on daily labor market data rather than static reports. The system collects and refreshes labor intelligence information every day, so employers, training providers, and educational institutions aren't waiting on state data that's already stale, "postmortem," by the time it lands. That daily data curates the job portals that align with each workforce initiative's pipelines, giving training providers a real-time view of what employers need in the market, information they can then use to attract and prepare the right learners for those pathways.
Fired Up Podcast: A Trade Collective Production focus on the Evanston community and the approximately 10 mile radius surrounding it. This show is a dedicated space for the conversations that matter most to our local students, families and businesses.
Patrick Hughes: The Founder and Chief Connector of The Trade Collective. Patrick is an Evanston entrepreneur and advocate who has spent decades building inclusive partnerships through organizations like Natural Ties and Inclusion Solutions.
Dr. Pete Bavis: The Assistant Superintendent for Curriculum and Instruction at Evanston Township High School. A veteran educator with over 16 years of leadership, Pete is a champion for academic rigor and ensuring every student has access to a successful pathway.