This year, as the new CEO of Girls Inc. of Chicago, Yani Mason joined a cohort of fellow high-impact nonprofit leaders serving primarily Black communities in Chicago. Through IGNITE, Mason learned how to expand and improve her organization’s work, from using data to team management and bettering her own skills as a leader.
“This was such a tremendously impactful program,” she said.
Offered by the Golub Capital Social Impact Lab and facilitated by Chicago Booth's Rustandy Center for Social Sector Innovation in partnership with the Chicago Urban League, IGNITE supports leaders of high impact nonprofit organizations serving Chicago’s Black community through a combination of business classes, networking, consulting assistance, and peer mentorship over a nine-month period.
Mason’s cohort, which graduated in June, included leadership teams from City Year Chicago, the Common Ground Foundation, Equal Hope, Link Unlimited Scholars, Sunshine Enterprises, and the Hope Center Foundation.
Mason said IGNITE helped her identify opportunities to improve a six-week program for 7th and 8th grade girls launched by Girls Inc. of Chicago this spring that included college visits, women speaking about careers, and conversations with high schoolers. It was one of the newest programs offered by the organization, which aims to fill opportunity gaps and empower South Side girls of color to reach their full potential.
Through IGNITE, Mason realized her team could better help those 7th and 8th grade girls envision life after elementary school. Upon their graduation from 8th grade, the goal is for these girls to stay connected to Girls Inc. of Chicago through the organization’s program for high school girls, called the Bold Girls Society.
“Admittedly, we created our middle school intervention with some assumptions and without fully considering all the inputs and actions needed to achieve our intended impact,” she said. “Through IGNITE, however, we’ve learned how to implement a theory of change that will better help us achieve our goals and maximize our impact.”
IGNITE also helped Mason reassess her own team’s goal setting process in order to better determine what they wanted girls to leave the program knowing.
“We are working through now, how we can, across our continuum of programming, revamp all of our initiatives to be even better next year, based on what we learned through the IGNITE cohort. It definitely helped us create a paradigm shift in thinking about how to become a data-centric organization.”
The enthusiasm of leaders like Mason is inspiring, said Tyeise Huntley, who leads the Golub Capital Social Impact Lab. New this year, IGNITE offered office hours with herself and George Wu, Booth professor of behavioral science and faculty director of IGNITE.
It’s a joy, Huntley said, to watch connections emerge between leaders in the cohort. For example, groups that worked with youth brainstormed ways students could participate in each other’s programs. Last year, two nonprofits ended up sharing space after going through the program together.
The Rustandy Center is uniquely suited to offer this type of program, Huntley said, because of its existing relationships with people and organizations already doing similar work.
“There’s a lot of crossover in the work of the center and the partnerships we’ve built.”
Wu said IGNITE facilitates connections and conversations between leaders of nonprofits in the city. By connecting, they can work together to better serve similar communities.
“You might think that the nonprofit world in Chicago is a small world,” he said. “Even though they’re in basically adjacent spaces, nonprofits often don’t know what other nonprofits do, and as a result don’t recognize all of the opportunities for partnerships.”
Mason said she was inspired to invite a fellow member in the cohort, Director of Community Health and Engagement at Equal Hope Jiana Calixto, to speak to her 7th and 8th grade girls after they connected as participants in IGNITE.
“It was great to have Jiana speak to our girls during our Influential Women panel,” Mason said. “I was moved by her passion for serving communities of color and helping vulnerable populations in Chicago have a better quality of life. She exemplifies the woman we want our girls to become in the future. We wanted the girls to have that connection with women in the workforce, high-achieving women, to see that you can experience challenges along the way, but you can still overcome those.”
Mason said the Rustandy Center tagline resonated while participating in IGNITE: “doing good is worth doing well.”
“We all want to do good, but if we’re not able to collect not only those anecdotal, qualitative stories, but also the quantitative, how are we making a measurable impact?” she said. “We’re really thinking of it as showing the change over time.”
