For decades, the Coleman Foundation funded cancer research, treatment, and care. We frequently asked how hospitals could collaborate to get cancer patients the best possible treatment, regardless of their zip code. Encouraging major cancer care programs in Chicago to work together was challenging given the City’s fragmented health system, diverse patient populations, concerns about revenue, and overall brand competition.

For two decades, we funded small cancer support nonprofits that mostly served local communities, and we struggled to connect them with our hospital grantees. Then, in 2013, the Institute of Medicine (IOM) published the report “Delivering High-Quality Cancer Care: Charting a New Course for a System in Crisis,” increasing national attention on supportive oncology and intensifying interest from cancer providers at all levels. “Supportive Care Screenings” and “Access to Supportive Services” became boxes that major cancer providers needed to check in order to obtain important accreditation for their services.

As I reflect upon our disabilities funding efforts at The Coleman Foundation, I recall something said by Susan Kaufman, CEO of Orchard Village, a member of the Intersect for Ability network: “If funders truly want their dollars to go toward a bigger impact in the work that they do, then bringing people together, as happened with the Coleman Foundation, is the best way to do it.”

A little more than ten years ago, as the appearance of autism was increasing substantially, the Foundation began receiving inquiries relating to it from prospective grantees. Although we fund organizations that serve individuals with intellectual and development disabilities, the field of autism was very new to us at the time. Fortunately, we had relationships with grantees who could educate us.

Immeasurable Outcomes You Can’t Purchase

I was in the back of the room listening to all of this and I asked a colleague to come over. I said, ‘Listen to this! They are all experiencing the same types of things. They are all trying to solve the same problems. We need to find a way to take advantage of this, to help them come together and do their work not as an individual organization but as a collective, learning from one another and benefiting from the shared wisdom across all their organizations.”

After making a critical contribution over nearly forty years to establishing the field of entrepreneurship in higher education, The Coleman Foundation’s focus began to shift closer to our Chicago home beginning in 2017. It was at an academic workshop we realized that this transition was not only important, but possible.

For nearly forty years, The Coleman Foundation awarded more than $65 million to advance entrepreneurship education. We began this effort when college courses on entrepreneurship were not offered. We funded college professors to teach entrepreneurship, and encouraged collaboration and peer learning to support the advancement of entrepreneurship education as a legitimate discipline in academia.

Entrepreneurship Education Improves with Practice

The Experiential Classroom is an annual three-day workshop for university faculty who are new to teaching entrepreneurship. Cumulatively, over the past twenty plus years, more than 1100 faculty have gathered for the intense clinic led by Dr. Michael H. Morris, Professor of Entrepreneurship and Social Innovation at the University of Notre Dame, and other leading academics in the field of entrepreneurship. Between 2011 and 2018 we supported 75 Coleman Foundation Faculty Entrepreneurship Fellows to participate in Experiential Classroom, where they were provided tools to modify their courses and introduced to pedagogical practices to improve their teaching.

In 2017, we began to shift our grantmaking efforts towards funding Chicago organizations that provide entrepreneurship education to individuals living in low- and moderate-income neighborhoods. As the program officer who works with these organizations, I got to know their faculty and I wondered if they might benefit from participating in Experiential Classroom. So, we funded seven of them to attend Experiential Classroom XIX in the fall of 2018.

Not only did the group universally laud the workshop as a venue for meaningful personal development, but their contributions to Experiential Classroom were valuable for everyone. Two attendees, Jason Johnson, Director of the Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation at the Chicago Urban League, and Loren Williams, Regional Director of Programs at Sunshine Enterprises, were asked to return the following year and present their own workshop as part of Experiential Classroom XX.

“Having the opportunity to connect with other educators with an academic background and having that fusion with the practitioners and the academics was an amazing experience,” Johnson said. “My staff was able to come back with new frameworks, new approaches to support business owners with things like Opportunity Recognition and ways to more effectively run their business.”