Community Organizing and Family Issues, a South-Loop based non-profit whose staff work to empower low-income people by tapping into the energy of parents and families and training them to become effective civic voices, recently earned a large donation from philanthropist MacKenzie Scott.
COFI leaders learned last month that the organization will receive a $2 million gift, said Ellen Schumer, COFI’s executive director.
Schumer described the news as “amazing” and totally unexpected. “Literally, you get a call out of the blue and you get this donation,” she said. Neither she nor anyone on COFI’s board had applied for the grant, nor had they reason to believe they were under consideration, she said.
Schumer noted COFI likely will use the money for individual projects already on its five year plan, saying Scott’s foundation has not stipulated how quickly COFI must spend it.
Scott, a co-founder of Amazon and a a novelist, belongs to Giving Pledge, a movement of philanthropists who pledge to donate most of their wealth to charity. In recent years she has become one of America’s best known philanthropists, noted for giving large sums of money to non-profits. Scott followed her usual practice by making no public statement about the gift to COFI, said Schumer.
For a quarter century COFI has encouraged and made stronger the voices of low income and working families in civic life. Headquartered at 2245 S. Michigan Ave., COFI also has an East St. Louis, IL, office.
Its organizing model involves reaching directly into a neighborhood’s most basic communication channels, such as a public bulletin board in a local grocery, to recruit individuals and draw upon their insights into what their community needs to strengthen family units and the community itself, Schumer said.
Mothers and grandmothers figure significantly in this work, and COFI also welcomes fathers’ participation. COFI trains and coaches new community activists in community organizing, helps form parent teams and assists them in creating policies, and implements a process of shared learning.
Issues teams take on vary from one community to another.
Typical issues COFI community activists cover include better childcare options in a neighborhood or an area’s lack of access to quality grocery stores.
For more information, log on to https://cofionline.org/COFI/.
—Sheila Elliott