When John W. Rogers, Jr., was 12, his father stopped giving him toys as gifts. “Every birthday, every Christmas, I got the envelope,” he recounted one evening this spring. Inside the envelopes were certificates—shares of General Motors, Dodge, or other blue-chip stocks. “You know, it wasn’t a lot of fun,” he confided, “at first.”
His audience roared, not for the last time that evening. Rogers, LAB’76, a University of Chicago trustee, went on to describe how, as a teen, he came to relish the $20 dividend checks that arrived in the mail. From his father’s friend Stacy Adams, one of the first Black stockbrokers in Chicago, he learned the ins and outs of investing while selling hot dogs and pizza at both of the city’s major league ballparks in the summers. Three years out of Princeton, he founded Ariel Investments, which today manages $15 billion in assets
The occasion for these tales of Rogers’s early life was the first Golub Capital Social Impact Lab Annual Lecture, titled “Elevating the Black Community in Chicago.” Chicago-based Golub Capital, the sponsor and namesake of the lab and the lectures, has established social impact labs at Northwestern, Stanford, and the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.
“The goal of this inaugural lecture,” says Golub Capital’s president, David Golub, “was to bring together Chicago’s civic, academic, and business leaders to share insights and explore how we can work together for the good of our community”—much like the lab itself and its home within Booth, the Rustandy Center for Social Sector Innovation.
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