2024 Highlights
People
Marshall Hatch Jr.
People are the heart of IFF’s work. When IFF partners with community organizations, we strengthen the people on the ground working to support their neighbors. When IFF partners with foundations and local governments that share our values, we build power with people and organizations that share our goals of elevating and strengthening community changemakers. Those people and partnerships defined IFF’s work in 2024.
IFF’s nonprofit partners are deeply connected to their communities and the people they serve. “The lifeblood of our work is relationship building,” says Marshall Hatch Jr., the executive director of the MAAFA Redemption Project. A faith-based organization on Chicago’s West Side, MAAFA supports the growth of the community’s Black and Brown youth through programming designed in consultation with the community. “Overall, we want to give people the tools they need to make healthy decisions,” Hatch explains. MAAFA engaged IFF as its owner’s representative last year to support the organization’s development of a 6,500-square-foot Center for Arts and Activism, for which IFF previously provided predevelopment real estate support and a loan. In St. Louis, Ellicia Lanier is also working to strengthen her community, and its children, through accessible, high-quality early childhood education (ECE). “We know that children need a good start to be a good citizen and a good human.” A long-time partner of IFF and participant in IFF’s Joyful Spaces program, Lanier is the co-founder and executive director of Urban Sprouts Child Development Center. Through Urban Sprouts’ mixed payment model, and her own advocacy for increasing state ECE funding, Lanier is working to strengthen communities across Missouri.
Caring for MI Future: Facilities Improvement Fund
Much of IFF’s work is powered by funding and investment partners that share our vision for thriving communities. IFF has a long history of working with a diverse number of funding partners, and, in 2024, that included some new partners. In February, IFF received a $500,000 grant from the Marguerite Casey Foundation. Based outside IFF’s Midwest footprint, the grant underscored the foundation’s belief in IFF’s mission and reflects our shared values and interest in building community power. Similarly, a shared goal of bolstering communities was the catalyst for a $350,000 grant IFF received in July from the James S. McDonnell Foundation to improve access to high-quality ECE in St. Louis. Advancing the foundation’s goals around community building, the grant supports facility assessments, grant and loan opportunities, and technical assistance programming for St. Louis ECE providers participating in Joyful Spaces.
When our goals overlap, IFF also partners with state and local governments. Last year saw the close of the Caring for MI Future: Facilities Improvement Fund, a remarkable partnership between IFF and the State of Michigan to advance our shared interest in expanding access to safe, quality, and affordable child care. Through the grant program, IFF administered $59 million to renovate, repair, and upgrade child care facilities across the state, resulting in more than 3,600 projects that created 10,000+ new child care seats.
After two decades of conceptualizing a project to increase residential development, the Village of Park Forest partnered with IFF in 2021 to begin the work of improving access to affordable, accessible housing. Last fall, IFF’s Home First team began construction on the newest development, Access South Cook in Park Forest, IL, which will support this goal.
Places
Home Sweet Homan
When a facility is thoughtfully designed, it’s more than just functional. It sends a message of inherent worth, value, and optimism. It serves as a tangible manifestation of respect, fostering a sense of belonging and potential for all who engage with it. IFF helps nonprofits conceptualize and create places that feel welcoming and empowering because those spaces tell a story about the value of their mission and the people they serve.
IFF is dedicated to creating safe and inspiring early childhood education (ECE) spaces, especially in historically underserved communities. In Cleveland, PRE4CLE completed its second cohort of child care facility renovations with support from IFF’s Real Estate Solutions team. As the owner’s representative, IFF helped six providers, each of whom received $100,000 grants through the program, reconfigure spaces to be more efficient, address pressing needs to upgrade their facilities, and otherwise improve accessibility and quality.
Meanwhile in Michigan, IFF celebrated the opening of its first owned development in the state, the $8.75 million McClellan ECE Center on Detroit’s east side. The facility created 96 new child care seats in a neighborhood with a 521-seat shortage. As interim owner, IFF assumes the upfront risk, giving the provider, Matrix Human Services, time to establish programs before assuming full ownership — ensuring long-term local control of this community asset.
The Blind Social Center
Affordable housing is the foundation of strong communities. In 2024, IFF and the Foundation for Homan Square celebrated several milestones to support the development of affordable housing in Chicago’s North Lawndale community. This included Homan Square Permanent Supportive Housing — a new affordable, accessible housing development of 21 rental units across three sites — and the Home Sweet Homan homeownership initiative — which is creating 20 affordable single-family homes on previously vacant lots. Each home will be sold to individuals and families who live, work, or worship on Chicago’s West Side, creating wealth-building opportunities for existing and returning North Lawndale residents.
In Gary, IN, a $235,500 loan from IFF helped The Blind Social Center open a new, 3,970-square-foot facility. The new facility will further enrich and stimulate the lives of members of the blind and visually impaired community by providing an inclusive environment to socialize and participate in programming. And in St. Louis, IFF’s $196,600 loan helped Power4STL purchase its facility, enabling the nonprofit to save $6,400 yearly and ensure programmatic and operational stability. Power4STL, established in 2018, operates The BRIC — a free clinic addressing trauma from bullet-related injuries.
Possibilities
Duo Development’s Starling, an Elevated Works project
Flexible capital is essential for successful community development efforts, but alone it is often insufficient to unlock the full potential of facilities projects, mission-driven organizations, and the communities they serve. That’s why IFF serves community changemakers with a broader set of tools, including real estate and construction support, development services, data-driven research, capacity building programs, and more. By meeting local stakeholders where they are, building relationships to understand what they most need, and deploying a tailored combination of tools to help them achieve their goals, IFF is investing not just in people and places, but in the possibilities that exist for stronger, more vibrant communities. This comprehensive approach to community development bore fruit in a variety of ways in 2024.
In Chicago, IFF’s Real Estate Solutions team played a lead role in the Elevated Works program, which provides customized technical assistance to developers pursuing equitable transit-oriented development (ETOD) projects. Facilitated by public and private grant funding, Elevated Works supported 29 developers last year with customized technical assistance. This personalized approach helped developers overcome funding constraints, limited capacity, and complex city real estate and construction rules. Absent this support, projects with the potential to meaningfully improve Chicagoans’ quality of life often wouldn’t result in tangible community assets.
Elsewhere in Chicago, IFF’s work with TCA Health illustrates what’s possible when flexible capital is paired with customized real estate support. In November, the Federally Qualified Health Center broke ground on a 10,000-square-foot Nutrition and Wellness Center that will expand the organization’s capacity to implement its “food-is-medicine” approach to health care. The Nutrition and Wellness Center will house a client choice food pantry, cooking classes, a café, and a multipurpose space to support holistic health education. Located in an industrial area on the edge of a sprawling public housing complex, the facility will offer the only fresh, nutritious food in the community. To facilitate the continued transformation of the property, where TCA Health’s headquarters is also located, IFF is overseeing construction as the owner’s representative after providing a $7 million federal New Markets Tax Credit (NMTC) allocation, a $6 million state NMTC allocation, and a $4.7 million bridge loan.
Ribbon cutting for a project facilitated by the Michigan Affordable Housing Loan Program
In Michigan, the profound results of bringing all of IFF’s tools to bear in support of a single community area can be seen in southeast Grand Rapids’ 49507 ZIP code. Since closing an initial loan in the 49507 ZIP code shortly after expanding to Michigan in 2014, IFF has provided nearly $25 million in financing to local community changemakers, completed feasibility studies to help guide nonprofits planning facilities projects, conducted research to assess local child care needs, helped early childhood education (ECE) providers upgrade their facilities through the Learning Spaces program, and undertaken the development of a 9,000-square-foot ECE center that will both increase access to quality early learning in the community, by creating 80 new child care seats, and serve as a teaching tool to help shape the ways that providers, architects, engineers, designers, and others understand the relationship between facilities and programmatic quality.
This ongoing commitment to the 49507 ZIP code continued gaining momentum in 2024 as IFF’s Michigan Affordable Housing Loan Program supported the development of 180 housing units across four projects that are designed to diversify the supply of affordable housing in Grand Rapids and ensure that residents are better able to access the housing option that is best suited to their needs. As this place-based work in the 49507 ZIP code continues, IFF remains committed to working alongside public and private partners and deploying all available tools to accelerate the area’s revitalization in service to residents’ visions for their neighborhoods.