We call ourselves a human investment firm.
In 2011, Jimmy Lee founded re:source Global, a faith-based organization that invests in global initiatives working to advance religious Gospel, and took his talents across the globe, living and working in places like Egypt, South Africa and Singapore. For four years, he worked with international charities and NGOs, helping them to develop more sustainable business plans — an experience that he would later take back to Illinois as president of Goodcity Chicago.
"One of the things that I saw was that Americans are really, really generous people, but what we don’t realize is that sometimes when we introduce half a million dollars or even $100,000 into a society that’s never seen that before, we've changed the fabric of their society," he said of his time abroad. "We’ve created dependence versus sustainability."
Established 30 years ago, Goodcity is a Chicago-based non profit that identifies and supports local entrepreneurs working to address the social issues, such as homelessness, unemployment and crime, that plague many of the city's under-resourced communities.
Since its inception, Goodcity has created 400 non-profit organizations in Chicago, 50 percent of which are still in existence today. However, only 15 percent of the organizations still in existence are what he would consider to be sustainable, he said.
"Part of this is that government has always been the funder of a lot of these initiatives," said Lee, who had previously served under then-President George W. Bush as the Executive Director for the White House Initiative on Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders. "What we found a lot of times is that some of these largest organizations, [organizations] that are like $18 million, about 90 percent of their funding was coming from government dollars, so none of them are sustainable, nor were they innovative because a lot of times the metrics for success were based off of quantity versus quality."
So this past September, after one year of piloting, the organization launched INVEST Chicago, an initiative that aims to identify ideas that are as sustainable as they are innovative. This particular initiative of Goodcity's has a special focus on female and minority entrepreneurs, the two groups most often overlooked in the tech industry, who are working to solve some of the city's most complex problems, he said. The first portfolio that has been established through INVEST is the Women's Innovative Fund.
Although business models and strategic plans are also taken into consideration, the measure of success and sustainability — and whether they'll invest — is focused primarily on the individuals behind the idea, specifically in how they value in terms of hope and motivation.
"We call ourselves a human investment firm," Lee said. "Our belief is that at the core of every successful venture is an individual, a leader, behind it."
INVEST Chicago — which has partnered with Gallup, SurePeople and Dr. Philip Hong, a professor in Loyola University Chicago's School of Social Work focused on poverty and workforce development — is approached with 12 to 20 ideas each week, according to Lee. If a particularly innovative idea is pitched to them, INVEST will give the founder behind it between $500 to $1,000 and connect them with someone who can help test the idea to see if there's a market for it. If there is a market and the founder is assessed to be someone that should be invested in, INVEST will give him or her $5,000 to $25,000 in seed money to launch the non-profit or for-profit organization.
The goal of the initiative is to raise $25 million dollars in funding for these projects. As of Nov. 1, it has raised $500,000 in the category of philanthropic grants, and the goal is to raise a total of $5 million that can be used for ideas in the incubation phase.
In the two investor-funded categories, Lee said they're currently talking to a few funders. Although nothing has been solidified, they hope to have $10 million seeded by the middle of next year.
One example of an organization to grow from Goodcity and INVEST's investor model is mRelief, an app that allows people in marginalized areas of the city to see if they qualify for city services such as food stamps. The three women behind the idea received $5,000 in seed funding from Goodcity, and have since received funding from the Y Combinator and the Knight Foundation, also.
"GoodCity is an amazing partner that has been an indispensable resource to us as we have have laid the infrastructure for earned and donated income," said Rose Afriyie, co-founder of mRelief. " The city's entrepreneurial ecosystem is stronger for institutions like Good City."
Other ideas that have recently been pitched to INVEST include an app that shows kids how to create games as well as how to understand where the areas of high violence areas are in the city of Chicago and what the contributing factors are to violence in that particular community.
Another idea for addressing youth violence was focused instead on building stronger families, he said.
"What we’re starting to find is that it’s not just organizations that start because government gave them money," he said. "People are starting to think outside the box to create non-profits and for profits and using tech at the core to solve problems in the communities that, quite honestly, have never been solved before."
We’re making sure we’re not just putting a Band Aid a problem.
Lee's long term goal is to take the ideas that work here to places like Kenya, Cambodia and other under-resourced parts of the world, he said.
"What we’re really trying to do is look at things that are trying to get rid of a problem, rather than maintain a problem," he said. "We’re making sure we’re not just putting a Band Aid on a problem."
