The Eleanor Blog

A guest post by Nicholas J. Brunick, Board Chair

At this special time of year, I hope that you will consider investing in the Eleanor Network to help hard-working, female-headed households in the Chicago region to climb the economic ladder to the middle class.

At a time when many are in need and our region is faced with numerous challenges, the Eleanor Foundation offers a strategic, proven way to make a concrete difference—to provide opportunity to working women and to improve the quality of life in Chicago.

The Chicago region is now home to well over 330,000 female-headed households that are earning less than a livable wage. Working women who head their households are one of the fastest growing segments of the region’s population.

And yet, despite working more hours and being better educated than they were ten years ago, these women continue to fall behind economically—stuck in dead-end jobs with stagnant incomes, struggling with poor credit, paying too much for poor housing in unsafe neighborhoods, and without access to the decent child care and proven educational and training programs that would allow them to get ahead.

And because they make up such a large and growing part of our regional population, if they fall behind, so do their children and so do we. We cannot hope to improve our schools, to make our neighborhoods safer, to make our economy more competitive, to balance our city or state budgets, or to make our region more prosperous unless they are succeeding—and unless their children can also succeed.

This is not a story of darkness or despair; it is one of hope and opportunity. The women that the Eleanor Foundation serves are motivated and primed for success. Over 90% of these working women do not access public benefits. Like any of us, they don’t want charity—public or private. They want access to opportunity so that their hard work can result in real economic gains—to the benefit of themselves, their children and all of us who call the Chicago region home.

By investing in our Eleanor Network, you create that opportunity. The Eleanor Network is a unique, one-of-its kind creation—an interconnected web of community-based initiatives which any working woman in Chicago can access to help her climb the economic ladder to the middle class. Through the Network, a working woman can access the four key opportunities that she needs to get ahead—1) education and skills-training connected to a living wage career with benefits; 2) affordable housing; 3) decent and reliable child care; and 4) financial literacy/credit clean-up.

Last year alone, the Foundation helped 2500 women to achieve or move closer to self-sufficiency. Thanks to the Eleanor Network, low-income working women are moving from dead-end jobs to life-sustaining careers in health care, high-tech manufacturing, and the construction trades (to name just a few industries). They become emergency medical technicians, CNC-machinery operators, carpenters, electricians, and welders. They clean up their credit and build up their savings, find better apartments in safer neighborhoods, and secure more reliable child care for their children. In some cases, they even become first-time homebuyers—the old-fashioned way—through increased incomes, substantial down-payments, and thirty-year, fixed-rate mortgages.

Not only has the Eleanor Foundation built this Network: we also maintain it. We rigorously vet and select proven community-based initiatives that provide women with access to these four key opportunities, and we constantly evaluate and improve this network to maximize its effectiveness.

The Network is working—but as you can imagine, the demand is great. Most of our initiatives have waiting lists and we want to expand these opportunities to more working female-headed households in Chicago.

If you are looking for a way to help low-income female-headed households, we will invest 100% of your donation into these successful efforts.

Better yet, if you are looking for a way to make a contribution towards solving some of our region’s most pressing problems—from better schools to safer neighborhoods to a stronger regional economy—I encourage you to make a donation to the work of the Eleanor Foundation. Investing in a proven model to help female-headed households get ahead is one of the best things that we can do to help our region prosper. Our investments will ensure that more companies have access to a skilled workforce and that more working women can reach the middle-class and create a better future for their children.

At this special time of year, we remember our common humanity and our interdependence, and we are challenged to find ways to share our blessings and to act together effectively for the common good.

I believe the Eleanor Foundation offers a unique opportunity to support the common good—to invest in a proven model, hard-working families, and our region’s future. I invite you to join our efforts. Consider an investment in our work and give us a call in the New Year to find out how you can get more involved.

Thanks so much and best wishes for a happy holiday season and a successful new year.

Sincerely,

Nick Brunick
Board Chair, Eleanor Foundation

Nick Brunick is a partner with Applegate and Thorne-Thomsen, P.C. in Chicago. Deeply experienced in community development, affordable housing, and nonprofit enterprise, he represents not-for-profit and for-profit developers who are building or rehabbing affordable housing or creating commercial enterprises and non-profit facilities in underserved areas. He also provides consulting services to developers, municipalities, states, and not-for-profit community organizations on a range of public policy issues. Brunick’s experience includes serving as the Director of Affordable Housing for Business and Professional People for the Public Interest (BPI), one of the nation’s premier public-interest organizations, as well as drafting state and local legislation, providing technical assistance and strategic advice to municipalities, developers, and community organizations, organizing state and local legislative campaigns, and producing policy research on affordable housing and policy relating to paying living wages to Chicago’s working families.

This past month marked my ninth anniversary at the Eleanor Foundation. How time flies!

Those who know me have often heard me say that I would never have entered the world of philanthropy simply to keep something going. When I joined the Eleanor Foundation, I did so because I believed that something needed to be built.

And this nine-year period coincides with the Foundation’s transformation from being a provider of low-cost housing and cultural programming to becoming the research-driven grant-maker that we are today.

And what a distance we have come. First, we commissioned research to learn more about the women who needed our help, learning that the population of working female heads-of-households in the Chicago region—as nationally—was enormous, that it was growing, and that it was almost entirely underserved.

We also learned that our women need four primary services to achieve lasting economic inde­pendence: career education and job-skills training, access to affordable housing, re­liable childcare, and money management and credit clean-up.

In 2005, we launched our three-year Self-Sufficiency Initiative, to start building a citywide network of services aimed at providing our women with these services. Six years since that launch, our Eleanor Network has grown to include thirteen programs, and last year, programs we fund assisted 2,500 working women and their children.

This all sounds great. Focused programs. A citywide network. Success in serving our women. And that success has been documented: our performance metrics show that our job training programs proved especially effective at moving our women’s wages forward, even during this challenging economic time.

But then we come back to the plain fact that there are a third of a million working women-headed households earning between $10,000 and $50,000 in the Chicago region alone—and their average household income is barely $19,000.

These women continue to struggle to get ahead. And our vision is to help every woman who asks for it. In the next five years, we need to grow our programs by an order of magnitude.

This year, we’ve been undertaking an internal evaluation of our pro­grams. Based on that work, we’ve learned that our women’s best shot at achieving a livable wage is career development: employer-driven job skills training with organizations that can also offer bet­ter-paying jobs at the end of the training. We plan to invest more in industry- and employer-driven job training programs in the months and years ahead. But our women still need the other supports our funded programs offer them in order to take advantage of this training and finish it successfully.

I consider myself very fortunate to have been given the oppor­tunity to help build a new institution in Chicago that is meeting these women’s needs. To our readers and supporters, I owe a debt of gratitude for helping us build the Eleanor Network—and I look forward to growing it in the years ahead.

Rosanna A. Márquez is President & CEO of the Eleanor Foundation—a Chicago-based nonprofit focused on developing and building innovative programs to meet the needs of female heads-of-households striving for economic independence.

Does Illinois lack for people qualified for manufacturing jobs? Or should manufacturers be more willing to train them?

That’s the question I asked myself while reading last week’s article by Kate MacArthur in Crain’s Chicago Business, “Shortage of skilled workers pushes up pay at Illinois factories.”

MacArthur’s article addresses the growing need for skilled workers in Illinois’ manufacturing plants. It highlights a finding by the Bureau of Labor Statistics that “Illinois factory-pay growth has outpaced the national average, all of its Midwest peers and all but three other states since the end of the recession.”

This is great news for the women participating in our Eleanor Network training programs.

But the article also quotes business owners who lament the dearth of qualified workers—and the amount they have to pay them.

I’m not sure I agree there aren’t enough willing workers in Illinois who would want to learn on the job and earn what MacArthur says is a post-recession average of $24.03.

But I do think companies can help the situation by working with groups in the Chicago area that are concentrating on job-skills training programs that help people to move into better paying jobs.

At the Eleanor Foundation, we believe that the best opportunity to position workers for new and better career opportunities is to work with social services agencies and with potential employers to train people for exactly these kinds of jobs.

That’s why we partner with organizations such as the Kinzie Industrial Development, Chicago Women in Trades, and JARC’s Women in Manufacturing program to train working female heads-of-households to fill these open positions.

Emily Stinnett, a program staffer at JARC’s Women in Manufacturing program, has commented on the work ethic of the women in the program stating, “These are strong women who are breaking stereotypes as they move up in the industry. They are excited and motivated, and inspiring to work with.”

Women have often been overlooked in what have historically been considered men’s industries, but as technology and the industry has evolved, companies are finding that there is great benefit in training women in alternative career paths.

The Eleanor Foundation focuses our grant-making on giving working women market-driven skills-based training that leads to a livable wage.

We have seen first-hand that Eleanor Women are determined, hard-working, and resourceful. Demand for our programs has doubled in the last two years and, according to our research the number of women-led households in the eight-county Chicago region rose more than 18% between 2000 and 2008.

Illinois’ employment problem isn’t a lack of workers. Instead, it’s due to a lack of employer-driven training programs. The Eleanor Foundation is changing that, one partnership at a time.

Rosanna A. Márquez is President & CEO of the Eleanor Foundation—a Chicago-based nonprofit focused on developing and building innovative programs to meet the needs of female heads-of-households striving for economic independence.

Recently, the Eleanor Foundation finalized our 2010 Annual Report—in which we offer detail on our more than $1.2 million in grant-making in 2010.

We’re also energized by a recent challenge grant from the Steans Family Foundation that promises to match donations to the Eleanor Foundation this summer up to two-to-one. That’s the basis for our summer appeal this year—and as always, every donated dollar will go directly to programs supporting lower-income working women who are striving to achieve economic independence.

So it’s been a good time for us to reflect on the progress and successes of our Eleanor Network programs.

We believe that the key to achieving lasting economic security lies in securing employment on a career track that leads to a livable income. So we are building programs to help Eleanor Women advance at work. We make two types of grants: resource grants and hub grants.

Our resource grants focus on employer-driven, skills-based job training. These programs proved very effective at raising our women’s wages—particularly impressive in this economic climate. Our partnerships with groups that offer skills-based training have stabilized our women’s economic situations.

For example, many Eleanor Women are enrolled in the emergency medical technician training program at Kinzie Industrial Development Corporation with Superior Ambulance. Those who have passed the state licensing exam saw a 15% increase in their median hourly wage since 2009.

This is a crucial boost when 78% of the women in our target population are housing-burdened, a term referring to households that spend more than 30% of their annual income on housing. Worse, according to our research, fully 57% of the women in our target population in Chicago are housing-distressed, spending more than 50% of their annual income on housing.

Our hub grants fund programs that offer women multiple services women need to succeed economically, including education programs and skills-training, along with access to affordable housing programs, safe and dependable childcare, and financial coaching and credit cleanup.

The Eleanor Foundation is becoming a national model for successful, engaged grant-making; and we build and fund only programs that show measurable, positive results. In 2010 our programs helped nearly 2,500 women-led households get ahead, a 32% increase over the previous year.

As you can imagine, we are immensely encouraged by our positive results, and we are eager to continue building the Eleanor Network to help even more of these hard-working women.

Rosanna A. Márquez is President & CEO of the Eleanor Foundation—a Chicago-based nonprofit focused on developing and building innovative programs to meet the needs of female heads-of-households striving for economic independence.

My readers know that the Eleanor Foundation seeks to help female heads-of-households with in­comes between $10,000 and $40,000. But you may not know how the Foundation arrived at the $40,000 figure.

My answer? $40,000 in annual income falls well within several well-regarded mea­sures of the minimal livable wage needed to cover basic, day-to-day living expenses, especially for families with children, in the Chicago market today—well regarded measures because they are based on years of painstaking research by scholars and others who are interested in helping this population to succeed.

For example, the Family Self-Sufficiency Standard (FESS), developed jointly by the national organization Wider Opportuni­ties for Women (WOW) and Washington University in St. Louis, is one of the most well-respected. Adjusted for fam­ily size and conditions in local markets, FESS offers a conservative measure of the minimum living wage needed to cover the bare essentials of shelter, food, child­care, transportation, healthcare and cloth­ing.

FESS establishes the baseline income that women in our target population need to merely survive. It includes no allow­ance for savings of any kind, none for any vacation time, nothing for eating out, and nothing for entertainment – not even basic cable TV.

In late April, I attended the national partner summit of Wider Opportunities for Women (WOW) in Washington, where the organization released a study building on its FESS findings. This new study was based on the premise that even lower-income working mothers and others should be able to do more than simply survive day-to-day—and that they should be able to build toward lasting economic security. The study sought to measure the minimum amount needed to cover the essentials, build a two-month emergency reserve in case of job loss, and save toward retirement and their children’s college education.

The Eleanor Foundation isn’t ready yet to adjust our $40,000 grant-making guideline in response to this new study. We remain committed to ensuring that working female heads-of-households—many of whom make far less than $40,000 a year—can achieve lasting economic independence. But the FESS study serves as an important reminder that working single mothers worry about their kids’ safety, health and future just as all parents do. Shouldn’t all women have the opportunity to realize such aspirations—for themselves and their children? We certainly think so.

Kelly Haley and Courtney Van Lonkhuyzen, two terrific women who are leading volunteer efforts for the Eleanor Foundation, highlight their appreciation of these aspirations in a jointly au­thored guest column.

The story of Kamilyn Baskerville shows how well our programs support women with such aspira­tions. Resourceful, committed, and successful, Kamilyn’s success is due to her own hard work—but she herself acknowledges how much she benefited from programs we created and continue to support.

Kamilyn is the beneficiary of one of the first Eleanor Founda­tion programs launched under our Self-Sufficiency Initiative (SSI) five years ago. That initiative recognized that, first, work­ing single mothers earning less than a livable wage were vastly underserved—with fewer than 6% accessing public benefits or programs. Second, it reflected the findings of our own research—that meeting the needs of these women presented a unique set of challenges that demanded a new set of strategies and programs.

To date, and thanks in large part to our donors, we have com­mitted over $5 million in grants over the past five years to estab­lish the Eleanor Network: a citywide infrastructure of services that seeks to help this growing population of women.

The Eleanor Foundation just announced our latest set of grants to Chicago-based organizations, eleven awards that total over $1.2 million. Most are renewal grants, reflecting how our Eleanor Network has matured and how much we have learned about what works in these past five years of grant-making. They reflect our growing convic­tion that the path to sustained economic self-sufficiency lies in skills-based training, which in turn leads to productive careers. But to be successful for the women we seek to serve, such training must be accompanied by certain criti­cal wrap-around support services, including access to stable, affordable housing, dependable childcare, and financial coaching.

Our latest grants continue to expand the Eleanor Network. And since our research shows that our target population is growing throughout the Chicago region, we are striving to reach out farther to women in these communities. As always, we are grateful for the ongoing support of donors and partners who continue to make the success of our women possible.

Rosanna A. Márquez is President & CEO of the Eleanor Foundation—a Chicago-based nonprofit focused on developing and building innovative programs to meet the needs of female heads-of-households striving for economic independence.