The story of revitalizing Austin, specifically through the Aspire Center, is spreading throughout the City of Chicago.
The City Club of Chicago, the longest-running civic forum in Chicago, hosted a fundraising panel discussion July 9 at Maggiano’s Banquets in River North. The conversation revolved around community transformation in disinvested communities, specifically as it relates to the Aspire Center for Workforce Innovation in Austin, which opened last month after years in the making. It also highlighted the importance of partnerships in such neighborhoods and included representatives from BMO bank and United Way of Metro Chicago, which aims to create equitable opportunities for Chicagoans.
According to Darnell Shields – executive director of Austin Coming Together and a panel participant – Austin has the most community-based-led projects in Chicago right now. And he said his neighborhood got there by building relationships between residents, nonprofits, public and private institutions.
“Leadership like that at every level – whether it’s government, civic, corporate, foundational – being able to work together, but also identifying our role and honoring each other’s expertise, that’s how we were able to cultivate this culture in our community and how it started to yield things,” said Shields, who is on the board for Growing Community Media, the parent company of Austin Weekly News. “You can’t have all of this progress without that type of union.”
This multi-sector collaboration has been a central tenant of ACT’s mission since its 2010 launch to support West Side social service institutions. Back then, and in developing the Aspire Center a decade later, ACT met with a range of community members, from pastors and elected officials to local nonprofits.
“We’ve really had this mandate of building relationships between all of these different organizations, leaders and agencies so that people could acknowledge each other and recognize what role they could actually play,” Shields said.
“A lot of why this works in Austin is because people are both allowed and encouraged to do what they do best,” said Dr. Kimberlee Guenther, chief impact officer of United Way of Metro Chicago, who moderated the discussion. “Through building those relationships over years, there’s a lot of humility in the work in terms of people not trying to take on something that they’re not good at but really recognizing that there’s already somebody doing that work.”
Deferring to those with expertise is one of the backbones of ACT’s collaborative process. And once it had built a base of West Side partners, others wanted to join in the process.
“It really took that collaboration of having community-based organizations on the ground, working with an institution that has connection to the other sectors,” Shields said, to connect with organizations that have significant social and financial capital.
BMO and United Way
Also on the City Club panel July 9 was Guenther and Darrel Hackett, the U.S. CEO of BMO bank. ACT, BMO and United Way of Metro Chicago started working together in 2015.
BMO has been a significant contributor to United Way’s Neighborhood Networks, a place-based approach to improve quality of life and reduce economic disparity in 17 Chicago neighborhoods, including Austin, by creating a resident-driven strategy and priorities. To-date, BMO has invested nearly $20 million in Neighborhood Networks and has promised another $7.5 million over the next five years.
“Our purpose isn’t just to do the transactions and to facilitate the everyday movement of money. We want to make a little difference,” Hackett said. “To us, it’s not really about the money. It’s about making it sustainable and playing a real role.”
As one of the 10 largest banks in the country, BMO has been giving back to the communities its banks reside in for over 20 years. In 2019, BMO made its first contribution to Chicago’s Invest in South/West initiative with $10 million, the bank’s largest donation ever.
BMO was the lead corporate funder for the Aspire Center, where the bank is also a “market-rate tenant,” Hackett said. The continued partnership allows BMO to sustain support of the Austin community past initial financial investment.
“You see these partners showing up to support those things because it’s aligned, not only with their charitable interests, it’s aligned with their business interests,” Shields said. “If you can make a business case around how you support community, it becomes part of the workflow . . . It builds care and capacity within a community.”
A big part of that, Guenther said, is transparency and honest communication with a community and its partners – even when things aren’t working.
“Having courage to say, ‘I’m going to step over that invisible barrier between us’ – that is so often rooted in resources and ideas that are put into place because folks with resources are the ones bringing them – and ‘We need to do things a little bit differently,’ at United Way, that was the moment that our model blew up and changed into something more adaptive, more dynamic, more responsive,” Guenther said.
Coming together for a shared purpose makes it easier for groups to have a communal vision, and to get people to rally around it.
“A lot of times there’s all these voices that are looking for these resources that are approaching these different groups,” Shields said. “But it’s only when you can speak in one voice that organizations or supporters can really hear and really know how they need to show up.”
“You cannot do this level of community development, business building, making our city better if we are not building these threads and these strands between us,” Shields added. “At the end of the day, all of it revolves around people.”
