DONOR SPOTLIGHT
The Richard H. Driehaus Foundation
ESC is pleased to recognize the generosity of The Richard H. Driehaus Foundation for its support which has made possible the debut of ESC’s newest solution for nonprofits in need, the Urgent Action Team service.
Since its founding in 1983, the Driehaus Foundation has been a recognized leader in philanthropic circles, with a special concentration in several funding areas, specifically in and around Chicago.
The Foundation’s support for the preservation and enhancement of 'The Built Environment' has played an important role in local and national historic preservation and promoting excellence in architectural design, exemplified in the Richard H. Driehaus Prize for Classical Architecture created by the Foundation in 2003. The Foundation supports work to protect our natural environment through efforts to conserve open space and encourage quality landscape design. In addition to these causes, the Driehaus Foundation also supports the visual and performing arts, and provides grants to local organizations serving low-income working families.
ESC approached the Foundation with a proposal to underwrite the development and launch of a ‘strategic intervention’ service that could provide intensive, targeted support for any organization contending with multiple, potentially devastating challenges simultaneously. The staff and trustees of the Foundation had seen cases where this sort of ‘crisis’ could cause significant, even lethal, damage to an organization, and the recent upheavals in the economy underscored the potential impact that a multi-faceted, cross-disciplinary approach to addressing the challenges could have.
Driehaus Foundation funding has been crucial for the success of this timely initiative. Now titled as our Urgent Action Teams, the Foundation has enabled us to develop a program and to train deeply-experienced volunteers to both lead UAT projects and train more of their peers for future work. The pilot project was recently concluded and already two new UAT projects are already underway, with very promising reports coming in from the ESC teams and client stakeholders.
ESC thanks The Richard H. Driehaus Foundation for making this new service available to the entire Chicago area nonprofit community. For more information about the Foundation, please visit their website.