The $20M we seek to raise will provide critically-needed resources in three important areas:

· $15M will be used to support capital improvements at our three flagship sites, which include our buildings located at 2929 W. 19th Street in Little Village; 5101 N. Kimball in Albany Park; and 3701 W. Ogden Avenue in North Lawndale.

· $2.5M will be used to support program innovation. These funds will allow us to continue to ideate, innovate, codify and scale promising and best practices like our TransformED Apprenticeship Model, which uses an asset-based approach to respond to the workforce shortage crisis in the early childhood education sector. TransformED does this by recruiting, training, and providing credentialing opportunities for individuals from the communities we serve who are interested in becoming early childhood education professionals. Ultimately, the contributions to our program innovation fund will help us bring models such as TransformED to scale at the city, state, and even national levels, strengthening the larger early learning sector.

· $2.5M will support the Center’s sustainability fund. These dollars will allow us to build on the small reserve we have and properly invest these funds for our future, while also using the interest from this investment to support the mission and vision of the Carole Robertson Center for Learning.

The Carole Robertson Center is prepared to accept many different types of gifts, including cash, checks, securities, real estate, and charitable gift annuities. A donor may make a one-time gift or a pledge payable over multiple years. We also accept bequests (outright, residuary, and contingent), which will be counted toward future giving and may be included in the campaign at the discretion of the Carole Robertson Center Board of Directors.

In some cases, we may be able to serve more children. However, it’s important to understand that currently many of our youth meet and learn in spaces across our three buildings that were never designed for young children or youth, and therefore are not optimal to promote learning and development. Rather than expanding the size of all of our buildings, particularly given our significant expansion of recent years – from approximately 1,000 children served in 2020 to about 2,500 today – our focus is on more optimally and appropriately retrofitting spaces within our current buildings to optimize learning among the children we currently serve.

As of October 2024, the Carole Robertson Center reaches approximately 15,000 children through our various direct services, family supports, and partner/subrecipient programs throughout Chicago. About 2,500 of these children are enrolled in programs at our three flagship sites.

It is also important to understand that, while nearly half of the children we serve will directly benefit from the capital improvements we make at our three sites, all of the children and families we serve will benefit from the program innovation that we’re able to support through the campaign and from the greater sustainability that the campaign will help to establish. For example, all of our children and families can benefit from our efforts to deepen and expand the mental and behavioral health supports we will offer as a result of our innovation work. We intend for that and all of our innovation projects (as appropriate) to be adopted throughout our Center and beyond. And we know that a sustainability fund will provide our Center with the stability and assurance we need to operate in unpredictable times. That stability and constancy benefits all of our children

Absolutely! All three of our buildings have gone decades without the updates and maintenance they need. At the Little Village site, the western wing of that facility dates back more than 100 years, and for many of those years, particularly when owned by the state, put off upkeep.

All our buildings are well overdue for a range of repairs and improvements. As important, our children deserve spaces that optimize their learning and development. For example, the HVAC systems which heat and cool our buildings are all old and need to be replaced. It is this system that makes all the difference between children learning in a comfortable warm or cool classroom (depending on the season) where they can focus, or children trying to learn in an unbearably cold or hot classroom that challenges their concentration.

As another example, the gym at our Little Village site was built in a section of that facility that was originally a school for the blind. It was never designed as a place for young children. We need to renovate it to be more developmentally appropriate, including updating its acoustics and sound proofing features so that children can enjoy robust play and physical competition without disturbing nearby classrooms. We also need to redesign the kitchens in our buildings to accommodate cooking classes for youth to help our older students learn this important life skill. And we need to purchase new furniture, equipment, and supplies for our libraries to transform those spaces into ones that foster the love of reading and literacy development, and that gives children and families access to representative books.

These are just a few examples of the kinds of changes we need to make. And we are committed to making these and many more improvements to our buildings because we know that just as children learn from their parents, teachers, and each other, they also learn from their environment. It is our commitment and obligation to provide our children with the best learning environment we can.

During our planning phase, we considered this option. However, we feel that our North Lawndale building and the original portion of our Little Village site were specifically designed to serve children ages five and under and that is something that we want to maximize. Our goal is to preserve each building’s original functionality while also bringing their systems, technology, features, security, etc., up to the 21st century. Also, we feel a new build at any of our locations would significantly expand our timeline in a way that would negatively impact the families we serve for too long a period.

Yes. We will work with our design and build team (architect, owner’s representative, and general contractor) to determine a plan for alternate space and will set a construction schedule based on the renovation work needed and the specific classrooms that will be affected.

Little Village will be first in line for renovation, and is slated to go underway in Winter 2024, contingent on gifts secured and our ability to successfully relocate children whose classrooms would be affected by the construction. Given this need to relocate some children, construction will occur in phases. We will work with our design and build team to outline a construction schedule.