Igniting Positive Change in the Community

It has been roughly half a year since the inaugural IGNITE cohort completed the program. This novel experiment in organizational development was created through a partnership between Chicago Booth and the Chicago Urban League. IGNITE is the flagship program of the Golub Capital Social Impact Lab at Booth’s Rustandy Center for Social Sector Innovation and aims to help nonprofits serving Chicago’s communities of color increase their individual and collective impact.

Leadership from the Golub Capital Impact Philanthropy Program recently checked in with some of the eight local nonprofits that sent teams of senior leaders to take part in the nine-month program. How have they been able to apply key lessons from IGNITE to enhance the effectiveness of their organizations?

We visited True Star Media, which provides hands-on media training programs followed by paid work assignments for young people. The enthusiasm of the students was infectious. They beamed as they shared examples of their recent work: capturing the action from the floor of a WNBA game, providing live streaming of a local music festival and poetry jam session, and flying to Las Vegas to cover a meeting of mothers of NFL players.

True Star’s studio space in Bronzeville was itself a fortuitous outcome of the nonprofit’s participation in IGNITE. True Star leaders learned of its availability from another IGNITE participant, Rebekah Kikama, executive director of One On One, which provides intensive individual coaching to help break the cycle of poverty. “We didn’t know them [True Star] at all before the program,” Kikama recalled. “When DeAnna [Sherman, CEO of True Star] shared that they needed to find new space, I encouraged her to come take a look in our building where we knew one of our neighbors was leaving.”

True Star moved in last July, and both organizations are already seeing the benefits of co-locating: “Now more people are coming to the building for similar reasons,” continued Kikama. “It makes it easier to work together.” In fact, One On One has placed about 30 young people looking for work in the media industry in two True Star programs.

Our discussions identified a number of other benefits from the program: a clearer understanding of their theory of change and how to bring it about, enhanced fundraising enabling growth, improved assessment of their effectiveness, and stronger partnerships, including with the University of Chicago.

Theory of Change and Priority-Setting

Jacquelyn Lemon, CEO of NewRoot Learning Institute, which uses a capacity-building model to help promote restorative justice and social and emotional well-being in schools, says she entered IGNITE with “a laser-like focus on building our board and fundraising. Through IGNITE we learned some powerful lessons, particularly about our recent rebranding. The assessment they provided us in the beginning of the program made us realize we had some key faulty assumptions—and we benefited greatly from revisiting our strategy and key elements of our organizational profile. The theory-of-change modules really changed us as an organization.”

For LIFT-Chicago, whose mission is to empower families to break the cycle of poverty, the timing of IGNITE was ideal, because leaders learned during the program that the nonprofit’s umbrella organization would be receiving a $7 million gift from MacKenzie Scott. For an organization with a $10 million annual budget spread across all of its regional affiliates, this gift was potentially transformative if invested wisely. “We were able to take the decision-making framework we used in IGNITE back to the national organization to help in determining how best to use the MacKenzie Scott gift,” said Sarah Spunt, executive director of LIFT-Chicago. “It has helped us with priority-setting and assessing trade-offs.”

Growth and Enhanced Fundraising

“They encouraged us to set some audacious goals,” said True Star’s Sherman. “We set a stretch target to grow to a $7.5 million organization by 2027. Our budget was at $1.5 million last year [2023], but we are already at $1.4 million for this year, and we’re less than halfway through. IGNITE caused us to look at our programs through a different lens. You’re so busy trying to make payroll and keep things working day to day, you don’t often take the time to look strategically at whether you’re getting the outcomes you want.”

“Before developing our new plan, we sent a survey to staff and our more advanced students to ask them their top priorities,” Sherman continued. “We mapped what they identified to help us prioritize and guide our work for the next 3 years. We just had a strategy session with the board, and a lot of the content came out of IGNITE. … It forced us to focus on how we can better leverage IT, to think in new ways about our human capital to achieve the growth we want; to consider how to maintain our core spirit as we grow, while not having it hold us back.”

NewRoot’s Lemon said, “Thanks to David McGoy [an IGNITE faculty member who taught a session on development], we now have a fundraising strategy. … We never imagined it would take us six to nine months to develop a robust strategy, but it has been worth it, and is already generating more money for us. We developed short- and long-run goals to raise revenue and diversify funds. We collaborated with our board of directors, and it has helped gain their buy-in.” It also gave NewRoot the chance to “invite critical friends in from the finance world” to be part of the new strategy.

Organizational Effectiveness and Measurement

For One On One, IGNITE helped hone a broad mission of helping “affirm the dignity and self-reliance of underserved individuals and families through meaningful work” to focus on 18- to 35-year-olds, the age group that sees the highest long-term return on the nonprofit’s efforts. “We were helping anyone who turned up,” recalled Kikama. “The program helped target our limited resources in the most effective way to have the greatest impact. Using the 2x2 matrix that mapped the cost and impact of each program forced us to be honest about strengths and weaknesses. These led to tough discussions and a lot of consternation, but it was worth it.”

“IGNITE gave us a tool to evaluate all of our programs and activities,” agreed Lemon. “Because of going through this exercise, we realized we needed to measure our impact in new ways. Now we’ve developed a data dashboard that matches all the key elements of our strategy.” As a next step, NewRoot will finalize its decision-making matrix, which defines who is accountable and who needs to be informed for each element of the strategy.

True Star also revamped its approach to program assessment thanks to IGNITE. “We learned to evaluate students using a rubric that shows what level they were at when they entered the program and what treatment they were given,” said Sherman. “We replaced self-reported student surveys with instructor evaluations using a checklist of key learning outcomes.” But this transformation remains a work in progress. “We don’t yet have a way to track subsequent job outcomes, but it is on our list.”

For LIFT-Chicago, the “team aspect of the program was very helpful, giving the senior leaders a greater voice on key decisions,” said Spunt. As she prepared to go on parental leave after the program, “The team was able to take the lead in preparing next year’s budget. We were able to work together through some tough issues, like how to plan for a steep increase in healthcare costs.”

Extending Impact Through Collaboration and the Partnership with University of Chicago

“We learned new practices from our IGNITE colleagues,” recalled Lemon. “For example, Aisha [Edwards, executive director of Cabrini Green Legal Aid] starts each board meeting with a client story.” Likewise, LIFT-Chicago’s Spunt invited her peers to join an email list for female executive directors of Chicago-area nonprofits and plans to hire True Star to produce a video for LIFT-Chicago’s 25th anniversary celebration.

Lemon recounted that, as part of IGNITE, “We had a stipend for a free Executive Education course at Booth. Five of our leaders took a virtual course together on effective communication. This, coupled with our newly refined theory of change, has resulted in increased revenue. We are so much clearer about our mission. We went back to three foundations to request more money, and it worked!”

True Star served as a capstone project partner for a negotiation course taught by George Wu, the John P. and Lillian A. Gould Professor of Behavioral Science at Booth and IGNITE faculty director. “We’d been approached by Nike, which wanted to license one second of a video one of our students had shot at a youth basketball camp,” said Sherman. “We hadn’t thought of licensing before that, but this content is now in high demand, as brands are looking for authentic footage. The challenge for the class was to come up with the right pricing for this clip and to build a whole strategy and approach to licensing out our content.” Thanks to the class’s recommendations, True Star is now “building relationships with ad agencies to supply them with multicultural content and is in a better position to negotiate,” Sherman continued. “That one second was worth $7,500.” In addition to the money, the clip also sends a powerful message: “So much of the media coverage of our community is negative,” said Sherman. “We want to show the best of our youth.”

Case Study: Maximizing the Community Impact of Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital

A decade ago, One On One revamped its approach to serving clients. “We used to offer a lot of standard workforce development programs,” said Kikama. “We’d have about 30 people sitting in a class that was very structured; it was a one-size-fits-all approach. This can be very effective for some people, but we saw that for many it didn’t work. They had a lot of complicated other needs—like childcare, healthcare, housing instability—that were preventing them from improving their lives. We wanted to think about how to supercharge our model by tailoring it to individual needs. … Nonprofits don’t always do the best job of recognizing what can move the needle for a single person today.”

The power of One On One’s individual coaching approach is perhaps best illustrated by its impact on the development of a new facility for Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children's Hospital of Chicago. Lurie had identified the Austin neighborhood and the surrounding zip codes as an area that was underserved by quality healthcare. Hospital leaders approached Contrell Jenkins, pastor of Lively Stone MB Church, about purchasing a block of church-owned properties to serve as the site for a new hospital. “Churches are the largest landowners in our communities,” explained Franklin Ballenger, One On One’s senior director of strategic partnerships. “If we had not connected with Pastor Jenkins, they likely would have just sold the land and got a one-time payout. Instead, the church has retained ownership of the land and will get a $2 million a year lease payment, and we’re now supporting them on a $19 million development project.”

“We put together an A team for the project with deep finance and real estate development expertise,” Ballenger continued. This helped Lurie “expedite the development and get the community buy-in they needed to unlock the federal and state funding the project required.” The outcome “won’t just transform the church but the whole community,” explained Ballenger. “The Lurie facility will employ 112 full-time staff and 30 part-timers. There will also be three other tenants, including a full-service restaurant in a neighborhood that currently doesn’t have one. Each of these new jobs affects five to seven other community members.” All told, this one coaching engagement could change the lives of more than 500 Chicagoans.

“It was a pleasure to reconnect with our first cohort and learn how they are applying their learning from IGNITE to their organizations and maintaining the community they built together in the program,” said Tyeise Huntley, director of the Golub Capital Social Impact Lab at Booth.

“There’s nothing better than seeing individuals apply the tools that you teach them in the classroom,” added George Wu. “And it’s even more rewarding when these organizations are making Chicago a better place.”

About the author: David Finegold serves as program officer, Golub Capital Impact Philanthropy Program.