"My original choice was to coach men's college basketball, but I had a pretty naive perception that people like you, you were good, you move in and everyone would be clear from there, but I found there's a lot of waiting and business aspects of it didn't really sit well with me," said Robinson. "I remember going to Stoughton or some city near Madison and I was in a room waiting to meet with a player and I was there with an assistant coach from the University of Illinois and the head coach from Saint Joseph's of Pennsylvania, and I thought I was going there proud, then saw how everything changed when they started speaking and we were really out of the spotlight. I asked myself if I wanted to be at the Division I level, even though I didn't I didn't like the politics that I saw going along with that so I moved on."
While a student Robinson was also developing complimentary skills for his career path as an employee in the Recreation Sports and Facilities office, the umbrella organization for intramurals, recreation, club sports and all related facilities at UW-W.
"Claude worked for Recreation Sports and Facilities as a building supervisor and was one of our best student employees," noted Gary Harms, director of recreation sports and facilities. "He had leadership qualities that prompted his promotion to this position. He moved up the ladder quickly from being an excellent intramural basketball official to this supervisor position. He was very well-liked, personable, organized, respected, hard working, and very cognizant of being a good representative of our programs. Claude was very trusting in this higher level student position and I could always count on him to be sure the facility was running smoothly."
Robinson, a native of Philadelphia whose mother was in the Air Force, attended Northwestern Military and Naval Academy in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. He left UW-Whitewater a year after graduating to move to his mother's home town, Chicago. He took a job with the Chicago Park District and enrolled in graduate school at Chicago State University. He juggled school and full-time employment, earning his master's degree in guidance and counseling in 1994. He worked at the park district, heading programs in two different parks, until November of 1994.
Robinson's next career stop was the Uhlich Children's Home. The Uhlich organization, which began as an orphanage for children of Civil War soldiers, has evolved over the years. In 2002, Uhlich Children's Home changed its name to Uhlich Children's Advantage Network (UCAN) to reflect the wide variety of services provided, and in 2004, UCAN merged with FamilyCare of Illinois, another agency with a rich history.
Originally called the Chicago Home for the Friendless, FamilyCare was chartered in 1858 to address the problems of the urban poor. The Chicago Home for the Friendless offered a wide range of services to help families overcome misfortune and remain intact in spite of their overwhelming troubles.
In the early 1900s, as social services expanded and changed, FamilyCare moved from institutional to home-based services and closed its residential facility entirely. UCAN guiding philosophy is "youth who have suffered trauma can become our future leaders". It now operates thirty major programs at nine sites thoughout the greater Chicagoland area to meet the needs of youth that are at risk or wards of the state, which serves approximately 13,600 young people every year.
Robinson's first job at Uhlich was as an education and employment counselor. "I was trying to get youth to move from a welfare mentality to more empowerment, to expose them to things that will help them take more personal responsibility for their lives," he explained.
Robinson's client list included approximately 75 young people at any given time. His responsibility moved from one division of the agency to running job development and educational programs across four or five parts of the agency. UCAN shifted him from the coordinator position to directing the volunteer programs, mentoring programs, an educational GED program, and the educational deployment programs. That progressed to new challenges as UCAN's director of community support where he worked with communities, religious organizations, small businesses and some governmental agencies. Now, fifteen years after joining Uhlich, Robinson is the executive vice president of external affairs and diversity for UCAN. He oversees inclusion strategy, communications, public relations, some marketing, development and fund-raising, some youth development involvement and strategic spiritual formation, and corporate relations and government affairs.
Although his responsibility is less "hands on" than it used to be, Robinson's work covers the local, state and national level, forming and shaping policy that affects young people. On the city level he works primarily with the Chicago Public School System, the third largest public education system in the country, where the majority of the students live below the poverty line.
"Beyond the issues of crime, beyond the issues of poverty, beyond the issues of family stablization, you still are trying to impact the ability of a student to learn," said Robinson. "Often students aren't prepared to learn because they have so many other pressures in their lives. We work with the schools to create programs that are going to minimize the barriers to learning."
UCAN has recently partnered with a group called the Academy of Urban School Leadership, a program that affects a total school turnaround. The staff at a school is changed, specially trained staff brought in, a new school culture instituted with the community's involvement.
"AUSL has had an incredible success rate," Robinson explained, "but they found that they weren't able to deal with those other pressures I mentioned before, and then that's where we come in. We've been fortunate enough to have strong relationships with our elected officials and get appropriations and earmarks for our programs, which we then offer to the school free of charge. That's been a plus in a time of budget cuts and the overall economy."
Robinson has worked with city hall and individual aldermen on issues such as gun violence, youth development, and community safety, making a ward and the city safe for constituents. Each year UCAN does a
national teen gun survey which puts the group in close contact with the Chicago Police Department, the International Association of Chiefs of Police, the National Council of Mayors, the Brady Campaign, and many other groups. UCAN is the youth voice of that coalition. Mayor Daley has announced the results of the national teen gun survey with UCAN three times over the past ten years. UCAN also organized an urban-suburban gun summit.
"Young people don't usually have a voice in these situations, so this is one way we engage them to be involved as solutions," said Robinson, "and not just seen as the problem."
UCAN also meets with state officials to educate them on issues that affect young people. "The most contentious issues involve gun control, so that's what our interaction is primarily about," Robinson noted.
Robinson's position has also taken him to Capital Hill in Washington, where he testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee in 2005.
"Senator Boxer went before me, the police chief of New York City, the major of Los Angeles, the head of the U.S. district attorney's group," Robinson said. "I sat on a panel of eight people to talk to the committee about not having suppression be the only way you deal with gang violence and youth violence. Prevention has to be a part of the equation, so we were able to turn a large crime bill from giving all the money to law enforcement to giving a percentage to prevention programs."
In 2008 Robinson went to the United Kingdom for an eight day "best practice" exchange with the U.K. government, talking about ways to minimize problems for youth. The trip was sponsored by the British Consulate General of Chicago. Robinson brought along one of the youth leaders UCAN had developed, and recommended that the YMCA bring a staff member and youth for the trip.
"We were in London, Manchester, Glasgow and Edinborough," Robinson remembers. "On our last stop we were the featured speakers at a conference talking about the war on knives. They were also saying they don't ever want the gun issue to materialize in their country."
"I remember the group of law enforcement officials in Manchester presenting a Powerpoint about all the people that were killed, and when they finished I kind of thought they're not serious are they", said Robinson. "Yes, of course, because they had ten murders in Manchester last year. But I pointed out that in the United States last year there were nine children under the age of seventeen that are killed every day by a handgun. So were able to talk to ministers of Parliament and other people about how to keep the problem from becoming as pervasive as it is here."
UCAN and Robinson were accorded national recognition by being selected by President Obama's Office of Public Engagement to serve as a part of a team studying fatherhood initiatives. The OPE is one of President Obama's attempts to get input from communities and constituents. Robinson is part of a bi-weekly telephone conference call and quarterfly visits to the White House for the group's business, which includes sharing resources to meet national goals. The association with Obama goes back to the president's days as a senator from Illinois when he was involved in several projects, lectures, and forums with UCAN. The same is true for current Secretary of Education Arne Duncan who, when he was with the Chicago public schools, who participated in many UCAN functions behinds the scenes. Robinson and Duncan were also teammates in a basketball league.
Another UCAN project is the "Uhlich Report Card", which is a survey of 1,000 young people across the country who grade adults on 18 areas including things like preventing poverty, building a safer future, and preventing smoking, and those results are announced at the end of the school year at the same time as students are getting their report cards. The survey provides quantitative results, but includes focus groups which provide qualitative data and regional views. Duncan has been a major presenter of the "Uhlich Report Card" in the past. At its height, the UPC was presented at consecutive press conferences across the country.
Robinson's work with UCAN has been featured in national publications like Ebony and Jet magazine, on national cable channel WGN-TV, and WLS-TV in Chicago among others.
"This year's teen gun survey has an interesting story behind it," noted Robinson, "because of Congressman Mike Quigley's involvement. Congressman Quigley won the special election when Rahm Emanuel, who also helped us announce the teen gun survey one year, moved to the White House. Congressman Quigley did the teen gun survey announcement with us in March, and then the next day he testified in front of the Supreme Court using some of the data from our survey in his testimony and in the press conference so that was a real positive way that we are trying to inform and shape policy."
Robinson's work has yielded with awards from city of Chicago major Richard M. Daley, WGN-TV's recognition as an "Unsung Hero" in 2000, and a Miss Illinois Leadership Award in 2001.
Robinson has affiliations with the Chicago Community Development Advisory Council, United Church of Christ Council for Health and Human Service Ministries, Chicago Committee on Urban Opportunity, Trinity University Church of Christ, and Leadership Greater Chicago.
