About Us

About the Eleanor Foundation and its Work
The Eleanor Foundation is a premier grantmaking fund uniquely focused on investing in programs that target low-income working women in Chicago who are determined to achieve sustainable economic independence. We do this by leveraging our expertise, resources, and research with our grantee partners to help build and track innovative programs that address the core barriers faced by working women seeking economic security.

Our Target Population: Large, Deserving and Vastly Underserved
Today, low-income working women are apt to be single working mothers juggling the responsibilities of single parenthood and their role as the primary breadwinner. Nearly 300,000 women and children in Chicago live in households headed by working women earning between $10,000 - $30,000 per year.

These women are the Foundation's target population. They see themselves as independent and responsible and are determined to improve their lives and those of their children. They are often one step away from achieving success. Conversely, they are often one unexpected event - a layoff, child's illness, a car accident - from seeing their lives fall apart.

And yet these deserving women fall stunningly below the radar: over 80% of working women in our target population do not access any help or resources, public or private.

These Working Women Represent a Powerful and Influential Market
Working single mothers often play a pivotal role in stabilizing their communities - including those into which many of the most intensive community development investments are made. They are the primary shapers of their children and their futures. They are the core workforce for many employers. And they wield substantial buying power.

Investing in these women and their success has the potential to reap enormous benefits upon their communities, children, employers, and other institutions with whom they interact.

Eleanor Foundation: A Modern Model for Grantmaking
Since 1898, The Eleanor Foundation's mission has been to help independent working women of modest means. Until 2002, the Foundation offered affordable housing, and educational and cultural opportunities. But changing demographics and the needs of this population of women prompted the Foundation to adopt a new means of fulfilling its mission: to serve as a dynamic research-oriented and engaged grantmaker.

The core elements of this approach are as follows:

• Research to Inform the Work of the Foundation and Others
  The Foundation in 2003 commissioned research aimed at providing a comprehensive demographic and qualitative snapshot of its target population and their needs. This research, published in November 2005, undergirds the Foundation's three-year, $2 million Self Sufficiency Initiative. We have also shared this research with our grant recipient partners and other interested organizations to help shape their efforts to serve this population.
  
  The Eleanor Foundation is using this and its other research to raise the profile and emphasize the assets of these vastly underserved women, and the role they play in developing healthy communities, all toward inducing others to invest in efforts to help them.


• Comprehensive Approach Creates Integrated Service Approach
  At the Eleanor Foundation, we recognize that the women in our targeted population are already stretched thin by parenting and work responsibilities, and haven't the time to seek out multiple venues for accessing services. Our grants are designed to provide to women through a single point of access, or "hub," the resources needed to address any or all of the four core barriers they face to achieving economic self-sufficiency.
  
  These four core areas, identified through Foundation research, are:
  
  
  1. A stable employment offering a livable wage;
  2. Safe, affordable and decent permanent housing;
  3. Reliable childcare; and,
  4. Access to affordable credit.
  
  Our opportunity-based programming integrates multiple services and provides mentors, guides, and roadmaps that will boost the efforts of these women to achieve self-sufficiency and flourish in the workplace by focusing on their autonomy versus dependency. We anticipate that our approach will continue to evolve through its evaluation process and ongoing research efforts.
  
  
• Engaged Investor and Fellow Problem-Solver
  The Eleanor Foundation's work with its grantee partners stresses engagement and mutual problem-solving, with the goal of building and tracking the type of integrated programming described above. This is reflected in our requests for proposals which are aimed at building programs together as opposed to ceding to the Foundation the ability to make straight up-or-down funding decisions.
  
  This approach recognizes that those in the community and in other sectors often have the best information and insights into what works and what doesn't. It also means that the Foundation is working to develop strong collaborations between the private and non-profit sectors, including with other funders and employers of women in this market.


• Rigorous Evaluation
  Critical to the success of this model is accountability on the part of the grantees, the women who are being served, and of the Foundation. In consultation with our grantees and others, we have developed a comprehensive performance measurement tool under which we can evaluate the effectiveness of our overall grant-making program as well as of the individual projects we fund under the Self-Sufficiency Initiative. We will report periodically on the progress we and our grantees make under the Initiative.


• Market-Driven Tools to Reach and Help Working Women
  Having worked with grantees to build a set of programs and resources for women to use to advance their economic position, the Eleanor Foundation is now playing a leading role in developing multi-tiered marketing strategies to find, then connect, these women to the products that will help them attain economic security.
  
  We have commissioned consumer-based marketing research to develop strategies aimed at informing and "selling" working women on the efficacy of seeking out the services that will help them in a manner consistent with their self-identity as independent, successful women. We expect to produce an outreach tool kit for the Foundation, its grantees and others with key messaging as well as a guide for points of contact that will allow us to connect with this hard-to-reach sector.