Small Projects, Massive Waves
How “Short” Projects Powered our
2023 Impact
When you think of "impact," it’s easy to focus only on long-term projects with multi-million dollar investments and massive infrastructure overhauls. But often, lasting change starts small.
In our 2023 Impact Report, some of our proudest moments came from targeted, fast-moving projects. We’re talking about the crucial workshops, the streamlined toolkits, and the strategy sessions that flew under the radar but went on to unlock historic funding, reopen neighborhood pools, and welcome hundreds of arriving families.
We invite you to take a look at the "small" projects that made a massive footprint across our region in 2023.
Economic Vitality
“I appreciate that Civic Consulting Alliance operates in a unique way, and is a strong partner that is aligned and invested in our mission. Recently Civic Consulting Alliance helped us quickly launch many programs, and the frameworks that we built together continue to guide us in our work.”
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Challenge: Cook County’s Bureau of Economic Development is responsible for promoting equitable economic growth and community development. Before the pandemic, BED had less than $20M to influence economic development. In 2021, that allocation increased to over $100M due to American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) funding for new programmatic initiatives across Cook County. This pandemic recovery funding has significantly expanded the scope and scale of BED initiatives for economic and community development.
Action: To respond to this significant expansion in scope and scale, we provided a series of workshops to guide BED to refresh its existing strategic plan, which we helped create in 2019.
Result: BED now has a framework to effectively promote equitable economic growth and community development in Cook County. This strategic framework will assist in shaping program design and selection of subgrantees, ensuring accountability for program outcomes, pursuing new funding opportunities, supporting program sustainability, identifying cross-department and cross-bureau points of alignment for greater collaboration, and communications. Recently, Cook County announced a $71 million grant program to help historically excluded small businesses in pandemic recovery.
Chicago’s Economic Development Vision & Strategy
Challenge: The Chicago Department of Planning and Development - Bureau of Economic Development administers critical programs that support business and real estate projects, including the Small Business Improvement Fund, Tax Increment Financing (TIF), Neighborhood Opportunity Fund, Community Development Grants, and monitoring and compliance of the Special Service Areas (SSAs).
Action: We supported the Bureau’s new leadership in a planning exercise to crystallize the Bureau’s strategic vision and mission and then explore implications for its operating model and capacity.
Result: The support provided by Civic Consulting Alliance helped lay the foundation for a more effective and inclusive Bureau, which is one of the most important levers in the City’s economic development strategy and operations.
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Challenge: The Offices under the President (OUP) are embedding racial equity across Cook County through the County’s Equity Fund, a $50 million fund approved by the Board of Commissioners in 2020. Read about one of the leaders behind this work, Chief of Staff Lanetta Haynes Turner, in the Chicago Tribune’s profile, “Toni Preckwinkle’s chief of staff uses equity fund to uplift Black, brown communities.”
Action: Our pro bono partner, Slalom, provided a series of workshops and training to help the County build a framework to quantify the impact of Equity Fund investments. This project leveraged Slalom’s Impact Excellence Framework to create a common language by defining goals, data sets, metrics, and other needed information to evaluate the impact of the County’s efforts to advance systems level reforms and the various programs that work to eliminate existing inequities in historically disinvested communities.
Result: This information will help the County identify and publicly report on the use of Equity Fund and American Rescue Plan Act funding, and the impact on equity across Cook County. Access previous versions of the Equity Fund Report and the Equity Fund Progress Report on the Cook County website.
Partners: Slalom
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Challenge: We supported the Mayor’s Office and the City’s Department of Planning and Development to develop an orientation session for finalists of the Community Development Grant program. This new initiative funds catalytic, mixed-use developments across the City with grants ranging from $23,000 to $250,000.
Action: We helped prepare materials, find speakers, manage the event logistics, and analyze attendee feedback to improve future orientation sessions.
Result: 39 grantees attended the orientation, which prepared them to execute their proposals and allowed for networking with experts on funding, construction management and architectural design. This effort will help fund projects that will strengthen local business corridors and enhance neighborhood vitality. Learn more about the 12 neighborhood Businesses that received more than $27 million in Community Development grants.
Optimizing Chicago’s Tree Planting
Challenge : Trees are a critical piece of Chicago’s infrastructure and are vital to reducing climate change impacts such as urban heat island effects and frequent flooding. The City joined forces with Civic Consulting Alliance to strategize and enhance the expansion of Chicago’s urban forest, which is a cornerstone of the city’s Climate Action Plan. This collaboration focused on developing and implementing tree equity strategies that leverage external resources to prioritize tree planting in the City's under-canopied communities.
Action: We explored optimal strategies to expand and maintain the City’s Tree Ambassador program, a community-driven initiative aimed at achieving the City's goal of planting 75,000 trees in the upcoming five years. With pro bono assistance from Accenture, this 8-week endeavor delved into the organizational and technical aspects essential for the program's ongoing success.
Result: Final deliverables included comprehensive training materials, recommendations for an ongoing organizational framework with roles and responsibilities, and a uniform process for onboarding new Tree Ambassador community-based organizations. Now, under-canopied community areas are poised to benefit immensely from expanded tree coverage in the foreseeable future.
Want to get involved? Learn more about the City’s tree equity efforts via the City’s website.
To request a City parkway tree, call 311 or download the CHI311 app
Partners: Accenture
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Challenge: The newly appointed Park District Superintendent was challenged with improving effectiveness and accountability in the Aquatics Division. Complex internal processes and labor market conditions in the first season after the pandemic resulted in the District facing challenges in recruiting enough seasonal staff for the 2022 Summer season, resulting in 45 pools remaining closed in addition to other limitations affecting beaches.
Action: A pro bono team from West Monroe conducted numerous leadership and staff interviews, surveys, and workshops to assess the organizational effectiveness of the Aquatics division, and engage staff to identify initiatives and actions to accelerate cultural change. In October 2022, the team delivered an assessment of the current structure and recommendations for optimization; a vision for the “future state” culture; and a portfolio of short and long-term initiatives to address structural changes, governance, and change management. In June 2023, the Chicago Park District successfully recruited and hired enough lifeguard candidates to open all 77 indoor and outdoor pools for the summer season.
Partners: West Monroe
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Challenge: Chicago is home to unique public spaces and assets to host large, high-profile events that raise significant revenues and may affect the entire city (e.g. NASCAR, NFL Draft). The Mayor’s Office believed that there was room to improve the processes through which the City’s assets are marketed, optimize coordination across City governments impacted by events, and increase revenues by dedicating specialized marketing capacity.
Action: Civic Consulting Alliance helped the City quickly explore the feasibility of a centralized coordination function to support the attraction and planning of large-scale events. Through a series of conversations and interviews with the Departments and other stakeholders, we identified improvements to the City’s process of recruiting, negotiating, and planning for large events.
Result: The recommendations resulted in new positions created in 2023 to lead client-facing and internal coordination.
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Challenge : Coordination among City of Chicago departments that offer youth-related programs is less effective than it could be. One particular issue is that while one department may provide a variety of programs, staff may not be aware of related programs available in other departments. This includes programs that share a targeted population, program activity or neighborhood. Without knowing of these programs, frontline staff that engage with the city’s children lose an opportunity to make well-timed and well-targeted referrals.
Action: We collaborated with the Mayor's Office and City staff to explore communications strategies to improve awareness of various youth-related programs among mid- and frontline-level staff at City departments and sister agencies. We developed draft material to help increase awareness of youth programs, and helped build a communications strategy that includes newsletters, promotional booklets, materials for webinars, and email communications. We also established a rollout strategy, and helped define success metrics for this effort.
Result: This improved coordination will ensure that more youth and their families can receive more relevant and actionable referrals to programs. We believe that this work will lead to improved youth outcomes, and builds on at least three recent priorities coordinated by Civic Consulting Alliance – the 2-1-1 helpline service with United Way of Metropolitan Chicago, the Community Safety Coordination Center, and My Chi. My Future. Visit the City of Chicago’s Youth Continuum for a comprehensive list of youth-related programming offered by City department's sister agencies.
Education
“Civic Consulting Alliance’s partnership gave us strategies that we can utilize in the future to meet the needs of families with school-aged children coming to Chicago.”
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Challenge: City Colleges of Chicago's (CCC) 2021 - 2025 Strategic Framework includes a goal to advance upward mobility among CCC students and alumni through development of high-quality pathways. These clear pathways will help students explore, select, navigate, complete, and plan for employment and/or further education.Action: To make progress against this goal, CCC has requested support in revamping the student career planning journey. The project approach entailed a current state analysis of its Career Services resources at the college and district office, development of future state student journey maps based on student archetype, and a roadmap of recommendations to achieve that vision. West Monroe provided pro bono support to the CCC team to conduct this assessment and strengthen their career service offerings. Their thirteen recommendations spanned enhancing current tools, standardizing offerings across colleges, expanding staff capabilities, and systematizing student data.
Result: City Colleges now has a roadmap to build student-centered systems and practices that are essential to its vision to be recognized as Chicago’s most accessible higher education engine of socioeconomic mobility and racial equity – and address the economic needs of Chicago.
Partners: West Monroe
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Challenge: This school year, Chicago Public Schools (CPS) has enrolled an influx of new English Learner students who recently arrived in Chicago with their families. This not only created an undue burden on schools to ensure families had access to appropriate supports, and such families did not always receive appropriate bilingual education services due to a mismatch between shelter location and the location of CPS’ robust bilingual education programs.
Action: In late February, we answered a call from the Office of Language and Cultural Education to develop a newcomer support strategy that explores models for addressing the unique services needed for new arrivals upon enrollment (e.g. enrollment counseling, language assessment, trauma screening, etc.) . We provided recommendations to pilot welcoming centers, including potential locations, service plan, staffing model, and roadmap to launch.
Result: Civic Consulting Alliance delivered its final recommendations for an innovative model to welcome students, and a pilot program opened at Roberto Clemente High School in July 2023. Now, newcomer students and their families can access enrollment and language screening services, as well as support resources including transportation, supplies, health screenings, and dental health - all in one centralized location.
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Challenge: According to research by Lurie Children’s Hospital, 44% of children in Chicago experienced an increase in at least one mental or behavioral health symptom during the pandemic. Due in part to the stigmatization of mental health needs and under-resourcing of services, the current landscape of mental health services for Chicago’s youth is fractured and ineffective for families who need to find appropriate resources. There is a critical need for coordination and collaboration among mental health service providers to ensure that families have access to all available mental health programs available to them.
Action: We completed two phases of work to support the Mayor’s Office (under former Mayor Lori Lightfoot). In the first phase, we interviewed key stakeholders (including youth and service providers) to understand the current ecosystem of youth mental health related services and identify opportunities for improvement. In the second phase, we drafted a proposal for a high-level collaborative structure and an implementation plan for ongoing shared collaboration across providers of youth mental health services and related stakeholders.
Result: This is a topic of great urgency for the City and there is a lot of momentum and energy to support the mental health of our young people. With a new mayor calling for a sharpened focus on investing in youth, the City now has the vision and high-level plan for a coordinated future state for youth mental health that enables a more equitable, accessible, and effective system.
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Challenge: Back to school is a critical milestone for Chicago Public Schools (CPS), and meeting goals such as high first day attendance and low staff vacancy rates are integral to start the school year on strong footing. In the past few years, back to school planning has been challenged by the COVID-19 pandemic and substantial leadership transitions. In addition, CPS was scheduled to start school two weeks earlier than in previous years, before Labor Day.
Action: CPS called upon Civic Consulting Alliance to add capacity to their team and project manage the back-to-school efforts. We delivered a set of tools to progress monitor critical back to school activities and a collection of best practices for back to school planning - such as socialization and communication protocols – that can be utilized for planning each year.
Result: CPS announced that 93.4% of its 300,000+ students were in their classrooms for the start of the new 2022-2023 school year, the highest percentage since the 2019-20 school year. The Sun-Times article, “First-day attendance at CPS ticks up toward pre-pandemic levels” details the accomplishments of the back to school planning.
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Challenge: COVID-19 caused tremendous disruptions in student learning and social-emotional well-being. CPS was forced to navigate those disruptions in a reactionary way due to quickly changing circumstances. As the CDC loosened contact and masking protocols for schools, CPS needed to align their mitigation strategies with the most recent guidelines. At the same time, the district needed to plan for a future when federal disease prevention funding would diminish by Fall 2024.
Action: We supported the Office of Student Health and Wellness (OSHW) to modify current COVID-19 mitigations, engage key stakeholders around possible options, and map budget implications to ensure that updated strategies are at safe and sustainable levels. We provided OSHW with roadmaps for testing, contact tracing, care rooms, and vaccinations.
Result: CPS is now better equipped with strategies to mitigate COVID-19 based on the shifts in guidance and funding.
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Challenge: The Illinois Board of Higher Education (IBHE) is a coordinating board that works with entities across the state to educate nearly 775,000 students annually. They recently published a strategic plan called “A Thriving Illinois: Higher Education Paths to Equity, Sustainability, and Growth.” The higher education system has been an area of state investment with a $279 million budget increase for Fiscal Year 2024 – the largest increase in over 20 years. At the same time, the agency has been growing and adding staff members across the state. In order to fully realize its strategic plan, IBHE engaged Civic Consulting Alliance to assess its current team culture.
Action: Pro bono partner Slalom helped IBHE understand its current culture through facilitating three workshops that culminated in a shared vision and values that make work meaningful and a culture roadmap with tools to activate its envisioned culture.
Result: IBHE now has the roadmap and tools and actions needed to foster a thriving team culture and to support the realization of its strategic plan, which broadly includes revamping state funding for public universities, improving enrollment and graduation rates for students of color, low-income students, working adults, and rural students, and developing and upskilling the diverse talent pipeline to support the state’s workforce needs.
Partners: Slalom
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Challenge: The Division of Family & Community Services (FCS) is the largest division in the Illinois Department of Human Services and provides state funding for social services, including Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children (WIC), housing security, and youth development. IDHS will grow further by integrating the new Office of Firearm Violence Prevention (which Civic Consulting Alliance helped to establish in 2022), and Office of Housing Stability.
FCS awarded 1600+ grants, totaling over $990M in funding, to a statewide network of GATA qualified community service providers annually, using multiple systems to manage the grants, creating an urgent need for FCS strategic planning and alignment across grant portfolios.
Action: Civic Consulting Alliance and pro bono partner McKinsey assisted FCS in articulating a clear strategy and vision for its grant portfolio and mapping ways to optimize its grant management process.
Result: We delivered a grantmaking strategy and an implementation roadmap to support the Division’s capacity building and ongoing operational improvements. This will allow FCS to better utilize its resources to more effectively serve the people of Illinois.
“When the Illinois Department of Human Services needs support, Civic Consulting Alliance is always there. From helping us stand up the Office of Firearm Violence Prevention, to supporting our asylum seeker response, to strategizing on how we can be more effective and efficient in our grantmaking to social impact organizations, we are grateful to have Civic Consulting Alliance as a resource to help the 2.3 million Illinoisans we serve. - Grace B. Hou, Deputy Governor for Health and Human Services
Partners: McKinsey & Co
Safety & Justice
“Civic Consulting Alliance’s expertise and support have greatly advanced our violence prevention efforts beyond what any single government entity could have done on its own. We are grateful for your ongoing partnership in helping the City, County, and State align our funding and goals to support violence reduction, particularly in investments in Community Violence Intervention.”
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Challenge: To meet the letter and the spirit of the consent decree, CPD is shifting focus to ensuring that consent decree requirements are implemented in a manner that creates durable change through cultural transformation.
Action: Pro bono partner Zeno Group completed an internal communications audit and a survey of 1,200 CPD members, which illuminated CPD members’ perceptions and preferences for internal communications.
Result: The survey findings will provide the new Superintendent with the messaging framework and engagement strategy needed to successfully enact the consent decree’s critical reform requirements across the full membership of the police department.Partners: Zeno Group
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Challenge: The Partnership for Safe and Peaceful Communities (PSPC) uses an innovative model that aligns funders of diverse scale and mission around investments in evidence-based strategies to achieve a shared vision for social impact. Since its inception in 2016, Civic Consulting Alliance has driven this work forward, building upon our body of Safety & Justice platform work and our experience managing complex collaboratives to provide project management and operational support.
Action: In 2022, Civic Consulting Alliance helped PSPC design a sustainable backbone staffing structure - including an inaugural Executive Director and Associate Director - that will drive PSPC’s impact for the next five years.
Result: In late 2022, PSPC hired Esther Franco-Payne as its first Executive Director, following a search with pro bono support by Lantern Partners. Esther brings extensive experience as former Executive Director of Cabrini Green Legal Aid and senior leadership roles at other justice-focused organizations.
Partners: Lantern Partners
