 So, we Rise Together is now about two years into a five-year initiative focused on community-driven economic development. Our work actually builds on the Chicago Community Trust's 10-year goal of closing the racial and ethnic wealth gap. And we Rise originated as an immediate follow-up to a $35 million COVID response fund run by the Chicago Community Trust. The twin COVID health and economic crises combined with the unrest following George Floyd's murder and made it clear that we were in a moment that demanded a strategy for an equitable economic recovery following COVID. We know that the Black and Latinx communities were left behind following the Great Recession and allowing those communities to fall even further behind in the wake of the pandemic would cause an even greater divide in the racial and ethnic wealth gap. So post George Floyd, there was kind of widespread focus on the inequities, and we knew we wanted to move quickly to take advantage of kind of this once-in-a-generation focus and opportunity to build thriving neighborhoods in Chicago. We gave ourselves five years start to finish to underscore the urgency. And to be strategic, we focused on three strategies that we believe will add up to the vision, let me see that you see here, spurring neighborhood investments, strengthening local Black and Latinx businesses, and increasing quality employment. Most importantly, equity required that community had to be at the center. Communities already knew what they wanted. Many of them had quality of life plans laying out their visions for what they saw as a stronger future. And in many communities, we learned that there were real estate development projects that were already teed up, but that had been completely stalled by the pandemic. So we didn't really need to start from scratch trying to figure out what communities needed. They already knew. We needed to listen, to believe in, and to invest in their projects. Our model for strong local economies means that we honor the existing community plans, and then in addition, conduct conversations with community leaders who help to affirm that the strategies will in fact accelerate progress towards thriving local, kind of hyper-local economies. We also formed three pilot working groups supporting our grants recipients in three specific communities. And what we did here was create multi-sector working groups, so business, philanthropy, members of local government to integrate our three strategies and bring new resources and really help those projects stay on track. Here is what we've achieved so far. In one year of grant-making, we've invested nearly $30 million to date, including $23 million in 27 neighborhood anchor projects. Those projects are valued at a total of $291 million. But for we rise investment and the flexible dollars that we brought to those projects, those projects likely would still, many of them would still be stalled. Four of the 27 projects that we have funded have already opened their doors, with four more scheduled to open this year. These brick-and-mortar developments create anchors for broader economic growth. They also bring hope and some 3,000 direct jobs for their communities. With grants supporting small businesses and workforce development, another 5,000 residents will be trained by local workforce development organizations that we have funded. So how will we know this is working? We're evaluating the initiative in an ongoing way, with nearly real-time data, annual assessments, and a final report. We're focused on metrics that we think are meaningful to donors, partners, and communities. Things like how much additional money is spent and circulating near those anchor projects, how many jobs are created, and how many small businesses are operating. I think it's pretty exciting work. So I'm pleased to be joined by three of the people who are doing the hard work behind those metrics to make our communities stronger. Gina Spitz is the Associate Research Professor at the Center for Urban Research and Learning at Loyola University. The team at Loyola is making sure we understand the impact of new investments on communities, and we are engaging community members themselves in helping to acquire the data, specifically an organization called MAPCOR is an evaluation partner, and they train and employ local youth as data scientists to collect information about community assets that everyone can use in Chicago to make the city stronger. I'm also pleased to be joined by Guion Forman of Washington Park Development Group. Guion is leading the redevelopment of the Overton Center for Excellence, a former Chicago public school in Chicago's predominantly black neighborhood of Bronzeville. The site will house a creative hub that is accessible to the community and supports arts, technology, and non-profit startups as well as local businesses. And we'll talk with Juan Saldana of P3 Markets, who is leading the development of Eskina Cafe in Chicago's predominantly Latinx neighborhood of Little Village. Eskina will be a commercial and cultural amenity with approximately 13,000 square feet of commercial retail including a business incubator, co-working office, local cafe, and shared community kitchen. So let's get into the discussion with our panelists. And if you have questions, I think there is an app to record the questions as we go, but if we don't get to your questions, we'll certainly try to follow up and make sure that we answer them. So I'm going to start with you Juan. Eskina Cafe creates an important gathering space and business center in a predominantly Latino community. So I'd like to learn a little more about the project itself, how it was developed, and how community interactions have helped to shape the project. Thank you so much for a great question. So I'll start by talking a little bit about our firm. So Petri Market is a commercial real estate firm. We focus on creating mixed-use scalable assets that catalyze community reinvestment. And so Eskina is a phenomenal example of creating opportunity infrastructure to revitalize the corridor. So the 263 corridor is a very active corridor. It's been a sort of a stalwart for the community, the Latin community in Chicago. A lot of Mexican families and immigrants have gone there and set up business for a long time. And for many years it was looked at as the second magnificent mile, the magnificent mile for people that don't know there is basically the corridor with the most retail taxes in the city of Chicago. Well the corridor has experienced a lot of changes and this particular building is right in the middle of the corridor. It's basically a three-mile corridor. And so what we did is we started looking at it. So Eskina really, it's a play on words right, Eskina means corner. And so we use the word acts to denote an intersection or corner. And typically in a corner is what we looked at is the old world where there was a lot of things that are shifting in the community and we wanted to create something new that would be transformative. And so in this regard we wanted to create a project that really resembled what the community needed. I had the opportunity to interview many, many businesses and entrepreneurs that wanted to start up in Little Village. We worked with local organizations and looked at the quality of life plan to determine that there was a gap, there was a lot of gaps in the community. There's a lot of resources but they weren't able to come together in one location. So we had to explain the project in a way where it makes sense where we're looking at balancing the economic development and making sure that the project is viable and can actually become sustainable over the long term. So to create such a thing we have to look at really what are the co-benefits that are created in the process. And that took roughly about a year and a half, two years of really digging deep and listening to the community. So we assembled the community, understood what was needed and then we moved over to the transaction space and this is where we rise together was really helpful because we were looking at a project that was also drawing a lot of interest from the community as well as the City of Chicago and other organizations that were interested in joining us for this project. So the project itself is going to create opportunities for entrepreneurs but it's also going to pull together all the resources necessary so they can continue sort of building their stories and the idea is Iskina being at a corner, being at the intersection of something old to something new is really there to create the new brand of entrepreneurs. So there's a legacy of entrepreneurship already in the community. We're just basically expanding on that going forward. So that's the gist of the idea and really the value that we rise together abroad to the project was that it was stuck during the pandemic and so the project itself I think will create a lot of co-benefits for the community and it also is a sustainable project on the capital side. So it's made and built as a building and an asset but also as an engine for community and economic redevelopment. Thank you Gloria. Thanks Juan and I think you know let's yeah let's follow up on Overtin. It's also a large-scale project serving a largely black community and for those who don't know Chicago experienced a number of school closing many many of them in our black neighborhoods leaving some beautiful buildings completely unattended. So tell us about how you came to you know focus on this project and how does the community feel about having this it's a beautiful building reopened. Yeah so in 2013 the city of Chicago Chicago public schools closed 50 schools. As you can imagine this was it had a devastating effect on the communities themselves. These are the same communities that already were suffering from this investment from population loss. It's it's the same thing happening around the country where you see schools closing churches closing old fire stations police stations and so you know we thought that this would be a huge loss for the community and even though we were going to buy it privately we thought about what kind of use could we make where this could still be a great asset for the community. So one of the first things we did was we put the building on the national registry of historic places. It's a beautiful mid-century modern building. That allowed us to utilize some of the traditional tools like historic tax credits federal and state historic tax credits and tax increment financing is available and new market tax credits the whole alphabet soup of development that that we were able to utilize. And so this building had been by the time we acquired it the building had already been closed for three years and and so it's almost a whole city block. There are two buildings the main building is 65,000 square feet a second building that's about 10,000 square feet and the first thing we noticed was that it was dark the building is all glass so the first thing we did was simply just turn the lights on and we would do it in different patterns to kind of make it interesting. The second thing we did was we would allow neighbors from across the street to let their dog off the leash and that worked for a while until it didn't work right you can imagine and so but then we started doing other things opening the gym and allowing you know people to have a birthday parties or a zumba class or basketball people sit in the schoolyard and watch the bears games you know bring a screen out and watch the games. We partnered with a local planner Lady Paola from Borderless Studios and so she started this series of events called community days where each season each year there would be a different plan could be climate could be arts could be food many of the things that the pandemic certainly exposed there was a need in the community but we already knew and so it was one of the ways that we were able to connect with the community the people who actually lived in the community as well as people who wanted to serve the community so it was a way that we were able to to get a lot of feedback in terms of what was needed and what was wanted in the community you know the Bronzeville community a hundred years ago when the great migration African-Americans came from the south this was one of the communities one of the few communities where African-Americans could live as a result it was a lot of brilliance that came out of these community a lot of the entrepreneurs uh that that ebony and jet magazine or johnson uh products it was all they all came out of this community so when we thought about what the community needed and what would be helpful this is how we kind of came to this idea of this kind of incubator office space there's no office space anywhere in the community you know you'll see storefronts and so we thought how do we use this building to kind of be this launch pad uh for to serve some of the needs that are in the community and thank you again and i'll just mention that a number of the projects that we funded have co-working office space because it is really not readily available and affordable in many of the communities and it's a it's an asset that's that's much needed um Gina development impacts community members like from the moment the idea is proposed um long after it's built very often the big you know kind of energy phase is when people realize that the dirt is turning and people are are really starting the construction but how have you and the Loyola team structured the overall evaluation to measure the impact of these projects as they as they open and how do you know how will we know how the community actually feels about the projects before they open after they've opened yeah it's about the evaluation so i think overall um being from Loyola being from a community engaged research and evaluation approach we've really i mean i think you've heard in wands comments as well as gian's comments as well that community engagement has been so central to how this whole thing has been built out the evaluation has been the same way so what we've been trying to do is starting from the beginning i mean wrt really invested in evaluation for all five years so we're able to take the temperature from the very beginning um in in multiple different ways so there are some ways that we're we're basing this on traditional metrics i would say but then you know of economic development that are widely used and and replicatable but i think the strength again is um and our ability to take the temperature in the moment right now to capture like how how is it being felt in community by directly engaging with community members in the evaluation strategy um so we're doing that in multiple ways but i think for when we're thinking about how things are are looking at the beginning for really taking the temperature of what the initial impact is and how people are perceiving that with both metric in both ways that have to do with you know going directly to community members and and seeing how they perceive things as well as using real-time data that we're getting from um other places like spend data as well as travel sort of geolocation data in terms of where people's foot traffic is really going and will you compare that to like larger data sets like yes so and then you know in the longer term over the last you know we're in year one um and so you know we expect to be able to use this gather this baseline information and see where people are at where these communities are and they're all at different places too i mean i think that's one important thing here these communities it's not it's not a one size fits all it's not that every community is at the same place so it's really important to get baseline data from each invested community right and then in the future um you know years three years four years five we can measure against these larger secondary data metrics you know sort of traditional metrics of economic development again but also bring back in that community piece how are community members actually feeling the impact how because that's when you know when they feel the impact that's when you know that it's real yeah thank you kian you you mentioned the kind of the scale overton it's it's a big project what are you seeing in terms of other development are is it spurring other people to think about that particular area in bronzeville bronzeville is a pretty big geography but but when you have a project of that scale does it attract other investors yeah so the project is about 18 million dollar project and we're not on an island right there are others who have ideas and other projects that have been in the works for a while but attracting capital is always one of those tough ones one has a project that he's working on they just topped off the other day that's probably less than a mile away from the site that we're working on and so you know in our community we don't see other projects in the areas competing projects we see them as collaborative projects right when when someone comes to our site we tell them hey go down the street stop at this shipping container it's called boxfield stop over there buy a cup of coffee and we feel like the more investment that takes place in the community first of all just having comps there are no comps in the area so just the basic thing of trying to get financing and there's no comps for office space because there's no office space how do you get a comp if there is no comp so in a lot of ways our projects do feed off of each other and start one dollar attracts other dollars you know one project starts to help the other projects go and so in a lot of ways we communicate very well in what traditionally one might think that we would be competitors but but we're not we actually work as collaborators yeah one why didn't you follow up on that what's what's the other project beyond eskina yeah well thank you for that um yeah it's called 43 green basically it's a multi-phase project that's about a hundred million dollar project that's affordable housing mix use we had to convince light tech investors that a mix use project in that neighborhood would really catalyze the community and i want to touch on what gian said we we're definitely very strong collaborators we see this sort of like creating synergies around where things are going it's gravity right so that that your project's pulling gravity in and so all of a sudden there's going to be a little bit more activity we see the same way and if we can communicate and really share some of the best practices i think that works i mean for projects like the ones that we have it's not like a banker has you know a neighborhood community incubator on their vision board that's not something that they traditionally invest in so we need to figure out a way to really communicate the value beyond it being a capital value there's also the outcomes and their multi-value outcomes that can be generated from this so we again see this as a a larger ecosystem where this is a synergistic pro project to ours in that in that neighborhood in eskina that particular project on is going to revitalize a quarter as people start to interact with each other in a cultural amenity they start to understand more about what's needed they share those resources and they talk this is what's beautiful about your project people are talking they're engaging and and people underscore how important that is in community development that civic engagement is so powerful it also gives you the information that you need to be able to do your your deeper study and so this assembly space that we're talking about we're creating it right now and wrt has really helped us do that and we have to remember that no matter what this is a transaction right all real status is a transaction so he has project $18 million transaction eskina $5 million transaction the other project $100 million transaction so as we start building out the capital stack there's a ton of information needs to be there and that's the thing that we're excited about is how do we build these templates right that we may be able to share with other communities that are experiencing the same thing so all of these projects are also they leverage other projects right so I think about it as gravity and leverage there's going to be leverage for other like projects and we're hoping that you know organizations like we write together in a community trust see this the value of creating these spaces is so viable to catalyzing community reinvestment and looking at all of the partnerships that we have and we've created over time I think that's one of the other things that's really beautiful about this is that the co-creation process becomes so vital to all of this and that's what's happening in our projects we're not only building number also co-creating them as they move forward yeah yeah I think I just just to add on to that you know it's critical that we don't reinvent the wheel every time exactly that these projects are scalable and transferable that it works in one neighborhood it works in another neighborhood it works in my city it works in your city otherwise we keep starting from scratch every time you're redeveloping a school we went and visited five or six cities um where they've already redeveloped schools so we didn't start from scratch we use the the information that already existed the data that already existed to say hey we're gonna start not from zero but we're gonna start start from you know 50 percent because we will take the data that these other cities have already gathered absolutely and start from that starting place absolutely yeah and I think that that's so important because we're also trying to build on lessons learned that you know a central building isn't enough and we've seen this in Chicago where you have you know a whole foods go in but nobody's created a strategy to build the small businesses around it to make sure that as you start to attract those small businesses that you're training people for for the new jobs created Gina you know that's where your work comes in and is really important because we we want to understand the impact of these large projects but we also want to understand what happens to the small business community and how the residents are feeling and whether or not their economic