OUR HISTORY
Executive Service Corps of Chicago was founded in 1978 by a small group of civically minded corporate executives who had a deep commitment to providing leadership for the Chicago region’s public service and nonprofit organizations. Deeply involved in community service throughout their careers, ESC’s founders knew that these organizations were fulfilling important community needs, but also realized that they all too often did not have the management or governance to sustain their missions and provide the very best results for the people who depended on them for vital programs and services.
Looking around them, our founders realized that their colleagues and coworkers who were retiring as leaders in the business, civic, professional and educational sectors represented a potentially vast resource. This tremendous, unmatched reservoir of talents, skills and knowledge could be put to use in meeting the multiple capacity-building needs of Chicago’s fast-growing nonprofit sector. This great pool of talent could have a huge impact on the quality of life for all our region’s residents – urgently needed experience and abilities that might otherwise go to waste.
At the same time that these individual visionaries were coming together with this common idea, the Chicago Community Trust commissioned a study that led to joining up with ESC’s founders.
Building on the vision of its founders, ESC continues to recruit and train volunteers, both retired and otherwise, to serve dozens of local nonprofits and public agencies every year. Our modest but strong start created an organization that has put more than 1,700 volunteers to work in supporting more than 1,000 agencies over three decades.
In 2008, we celebrated our 30th Anniversary of service to the Chicago region as the largest nonprofit provider of management and governance consulting services in the Chicago area. At the same time, our now more than 270 volunteers worked with 162 clients on 189 individual projects – clients that serve a population of more than 900,000 local residents.