Professional Development

The Illinois AfterSchool Network offers professional development opportunities to afterschool and youth development providers here in Illinois and neighboring states.

What is our philosophy on Professional Development?

The Illinois Afterschool Network (IAN) believes that professional development is essential for empowering an organization’s staff to gain and/or grow in foundational and holistic knowledge and skills specific to their roles, thus increasing their personal and professional effectiveness and ultimately positively impacting the learning experiences of the youth and families they serve.  IAN is committed to supporting professional learning in the afterschool space through its deep bench of professional development events via distance learning sessions, leadership institutes, educational leadership symposiums, round-table discussions, conference and customized training to front-line, emergent and seasoned professionals here in Illinois.


We offer:

  • Two-hour regional training (in-person and Distance Learning)
  • Leadership symposiums on a specific topic
  • Educational Leadership Symposiums
  • Professional Development Round-table Discussions
  • Annual conference
  • Customized training for providers who are looking to contract with us to offer training on a specific topic with their organization.

Download a copy here of our Core Workshps that we offer.

Please note, that these are our core topics and that we have Facilitators who train on more than 50 topics in the afterschool and youth development space. 

We work with a cadre of over 120 trainers who facilitate training specific to the afterschool and youth development topics. These are seasoned trainers who are Educational Consultants; they own their own training entity, work for an youth serving agency, are employed as faculty with a college or university, or are employed with an agency.

Also, we partner with other national afterschool and youth development organizations to facilitate training with providers in the field (American Institutes on Research, National AfterSchool Association, National Institute on Out-of-School Time, Weikart Center for Youth Program Quality, etc).