When Fillmore Linen Service opened a healthcare laundry facility inside the Fillmore Center in June, the company projected adding 175 local jobs and processing up to 28 million pounds of laundry a year.
The impressive addition to the community wouldn’t have been possible without the Steans Family Foundation, which bought the Fillmore Center building in 2022 to help bring jobs to the West Side.
The Steans Family Foundation has grown in North Lawndale since the 1990s, and just this year has invested over $40 million in the neighborhood. And the foundation has a handful of projects on the horizon that will continue giving back to the community.
The foundation owns four small buildings around North Lawndale – three on Roosevelt Road between Pulaski Road and Independence Boulevard, and one at Kedzie and 16th Street. Patricia Ford, the foundation’s executive director, said they have two entrepreneurs to fill two of buildings, but are looking for two more to fill the spaces and take the foundation’s capital and technical support.
“We really want to, as much as possible, support Black entrepreneurs who might be providing amenity services to the community,” Ford said. “The people of North Lawndale want the same thing, and the same access to high quality goods and services in their neighborhood, just like the people of Lincoln Park.”
Ford added that the soon-to-be-filled buildings will hopefully catalyze Roosevelt Road’s revival.
“Historic disinvestment and underutilization have left the Roosevelt Road economic corridor in need of increased community assets, improved infrastructure and beautification towards a thriving and safe area.”
The foundation is also helping to develop area lots — either privately owned, owned by the city, or by the Steans Family Foundation — into temporary public spaces with green infrastructure and public art.
“Until the community identifies what they want to do with those lots, we want to signal hope, transformation, investment, value to the people who live there,” Ford said.
The lots are located in the 3900 block of West Roosevelt Road and will be completed by the spring.
Steans’ successes
The Steans Family Foundation was established in 1988, when its founder, Harrison Steans, helped pay for a group of middle schoolers living at Lathrop Homes, a Northwest Chicago public housing development, to have access to academic enrichment support through postsecondary education, including a college scholarship.
“They learned a lot by supporting those kiddos and learned a lot about the challenges, nuances, and complexities of what it’s like for families who don’t earn a living wage,” Ford said. “When their wealth grew, they decided they wanted to do more.”
In 1996, the Steans Family Foundation’s founding executive director, Greg Darnieder, helped create the foundation’s place-based approach.
“They wanted to work in a community that they felt like they could get their arms around,” Ford said.
The Steans looked for a neighborhood that already had a few anchor organizations they could partner with, Ford said. She added that, after Darnieder investigated a few communities, the foundation decided to settle in North Lawndale.
Throughout the years, the foundation has played an integral role in North Lawndale.
The Steans Family Foundation helped found the North Lawndale Employment Network, which helps under- and unemployed residents increase income through job and financial literacy training.
“The data was showing that a lot of individuals were returning to North Lawndale after having spent time in the criminal justice system,” Ford said of why the network was created. “But there were lots of barriers to employment.”
Ford said the foundation has donated to partner organizations that hire outreach workers and mediators who do violence intervention.
The Steans Family Foundation has also supported the likes of Lawndale Christian Development Corporation and United Power to bring affordable home ownership to North Lawndale.
The foundation has helped kick off a third-grade reading campaign in four North Lawndale elementary schools: Charles Sumner Math & Science Community Academy, Joseph Kellman Corporate Community Elementary School, Legacy Charter School, and Webster Wildcats Elementary School.
The campaign is for preschoolers through third graders and focuses on improving instruction, working with families of students with chronic absenteeism, tutoring kids who are farthest behind, and providing mental health support for students impacted by trauma through individual or group therapy.
In North Lawndale, the literacy campaign informs locals about the importance of language on the brain development of little ones, Ford said.
“It’s really promoting reading to your children every night and having them read to you,” she said of the campaign, which also organizes book giveaways at many community events.
More recently, the Steans Family Foundation bought the Fillmore Center building, where Fillmore Linen Service is the first business of many to use the site.
When the Fillmore Center is completed in the first quarter of next year, it will be placed into a community benefit trust, where residents will share in and control the building’s profits. Ford said the trust currently has $200,000 in it, and more money will be added.
Ford added that there is still room for businesses inside the Fillmore Center, which is estimated to create up to 300 jobs when it’s completed.
Correction, Nov. 18, 2024, 9:20 a.m.: An earlier version of this article gave the incorrect number for how much the Steans Family Foundation has given to North Lawndale this year. It is $40 million.