When Partnership Meets Purpose: How Lenovo, WWT and Concordance Are Expanding AI Access in St. Louis

At Concordance, a St. Louis nonprofit that supports individuals returning home from incarceration, that partnership came to life through a hands-on AI literacy experience designed to build confidence, critical thinking and career readiness.

Participants were already interacting with AI every day. They were using chatbots to build resumes, search for jobs and answer questions. But having access to AI tools and knowing how to use them effectively are two very different things.

Recognizing this opportunity, Concordance partnered with World Wide Technology (WWT) and Lenovo to create an experience that focused not just on technology, but on people.

Concordance brought deep expertise in workforce development and an understanding of the unique challenges participants face as they rebuild their careers. Lenovo provided the technology foundation through the ThinkPads that power Concordance's computer lab and sponsored lunch for the event, creating an environment where participants could focus on learning. WWT contributed AI expertise through Shanice Brown, Program Manager, who designed and facilitated the two-part Prompt Power workshop.

Together, the organizations created something bigger than a training session: an opportunity to ensure AI literacy reaches members of the community who are often left out of emerging technology conversations.

Why Partnerships Like This Matter

The first 45 minutes started at the beginning, on purpose. Not "here are ten tools," but what is this thing, actually?

Participants worked through nine short modules on a custom platform built for the session: what AI is and the AI they already use every day (Siri, Alexa, Netflix, Spotify), how we got from Alan Turing's idea of a thinking machine to ChatGPT going public in 2022, the differences between ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, Google Gemini and Claude and what lives beyond chatbots: voice, avatars, music and tools that build working software from a plain-language description.

Then the part that landed hardest: where AI goes wrong. Hallucinations. Bias in training data. And a real 2023 case where a customer talked a car dealership's chatbot into agreeing to sell a brand-new SUV for one dollar; a judge let it stand.

The session closed on what never goes into an AI tool: no Social Security number, no full date of birth, no bank or card numbers. And what's safe to share: your skills, your work history, your certifications, a job posting you found, a draft of your own resume.

Session two: the paper came first

Here's where it got interesting.

Days before the workshop, every participant filled out a worksheet by hand. No screens. Seven plain-English questions: What's one thing you're trying to figure out right now? What's your situation? What do you actually need? Who would you want in your corner? What would help look like? What would make it useless? And (the important one) what do you already know that most people don't?

Then, in session two, the reveal: those seven boxes were a prompt the whole time. Box four was the role. Box two, the context. Box three, the ask. Box five, the format. Box six, the guardrails.

Nobody had been told they were writing a prompt. They'd already written one.

That sequencing was deliberate. The concern going in, raised by Concordance's own education and employment team, wasn't that participants couldn't use AI. It was that they'd reach for it before thinking for themselves. Starting on paper answered that without a single lecture. By the time anyone opened a tool, they were bringing their own thinking to it.

There was one more constraint worth naming, because it shaped everything: copy and paste is disabled on Concordance's laptops. A security requirement, not a bug, and not something to be worked around casually.

So the workflow got rebuilt. Participants typed their worksheet answers into a Google Docs template, downloaded it as a PDF and uploaded that PDF straight into Gemini, where the document itself served as the prompt. Eight words typed by hand, and the whole thing ran.

What they left with

A five-part framework they can use anywhere. A prompt library covering housing, employment, family and recovery, not just job hunting, because the barriers people face coming home are rarely only about work. And a habit worth more than any tool: think first, then bring AI in.

Why this matters

AI literacy is being distributed unevenly right now, and the people most likely to be screened out by an automated system are the least likely to be taught how those systems work. Concordance's participants are competing for jobs where a resume gets read by software before a person ever sees it.

Teaching someone to write a good prompt isn't a party trick. It's giving them a tool that the people on the other side of the table are already using.

This workshop is one piece of a longer collaboration. WWT and Concordance are also building an AI-powered career readiness platform grounded in Concordance's own curriculum: career exploration, resume and cover letter support, interview practice and a personalized action plan participants can work on outside program hours.

From a worksheet and a pen to a working prompt in 90 minutes. That's not a small distance to travel, and everybody in that room traveled it.