Planning Future Places: Across the Midwest, Nonprofits Level Up with Facility Feasibility Analyses April 28, 2025

For nonprofits, a facility is more than just a place for meetings, offices, and programming; it sends a message about what the organizations located in them value.

“Space matters for nonprofits,” says Kate Ansorge, IFF’s vice president of Real Estate Solutions. “The quality and dignity of a space reflect how the organizations see the people and the community they serve.”

Despite this, many nonprofits face pressure to devote every dollar toward programming while operating in facilities that aren’t optimized to help the organization maximize its positive community impact. Often these facilities are functional, but were developed for other uses, and while upgrading these spaces may be a long-term aspiration for nonprofits, it’s too often set aside in favor of more immediate needs like maintenance, repairs, and other necessities for the building to remain operational.

That’s where facility feasibility analyses (FFA), led by IFF’s Real Estate Solutions team, can help nonprofits explore the financial and operational viability of renovating their buildings, or developing new ones, to create purpose-built spaces fully equipped to support their missions.

Serving as a catalyst for organizations that might not otherwise know where to start with a facility project, FFAs require collaboration between IFF and nonprofit leaders to fully understand the organization’s facility needs and challenges, and the most viable ways of addressing them. The goal of an FFA is not necessarily for the nonprofit to launch a facility project, but to have the information it needs to make informed decisions about the future of its facilities.

Highlighted below are three organizations from across the Midwest that, with the help of FFAs subsidized through their participation in the Stronger Nonprofits Initiative (SNI), gained the knowledge and expertise needed to more effectively plan for their organizations’ futures.

Chicago: Center for Changing Lives

Based in Chicago’s Humboldt Park and Logan Square neighborhoods, Center for Changing Lives (CCL) addresses the root causes of homelessness through what CCL’s President and CEO Juliana González-Crussi calls a “bundled approach” to programming: “If you’re experiencing housing insecurity, you’re probably also facing financial insecurity. We understand these things work in tandem.” Designed to help people build economic capacity and mobility, CCL’s programming includes housing counseling and financial, employment, resource development, and small business coaching.

Changing facilities to meet changing needs is nothing new for CCL. The organization originally operated out of the basement of the Humboldt Park United Methodist Church, providing shelter-based support to people experiencing homelessness. In the mid- to late-2000s, CCL shifted its programmatic focus away from shelter-based services and embarked on a search for a new facility. Though CCL identified and started leasing a facility to renovate for its new headquarters, predevelopment support from IFF’s Real Estate Solutions team in Chicago helped inform the organization’s decision to move on from the property after it became clear the costs were higher than initially anticipated.

By 2015, CCL had relocated to its current headquarters, a 3,700-square-foot facility that provides more space than the church basement, but still lacks enough room to comfortably house administrative offices, a waiting area, and dedicated spaces to work with clients. And close quarters leads to a lack of privacy for often difficult conversations with community members seeking CCL’s services. So, in late 2019, CCL again engaged IFF to conduct a FFA to explore expanding into a larger space, but the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted that work.

In July 2023, CCL joined SNI to bolster its long-term financial outlook and once again explore options for a larger space. Meeting with CCL’s entire staff, IFF’s Real Estate Solutions team explored CCL’s space requirements for programming, its preference to rent or buy, its target budget and fundraising capacity, and the ways a new facility might impact program revenue and expenses.

Looking at the spaces available in CCL’s target locations, IFF modeled anticipated costs, both for facility acquisition and for the ways facility changes might impact operating costs (e.g., heating/cooling a larger space). Last summer, CCL was presented with three options to consider pursuing: 1) purchasing and renovating an 11,000 square-foot facility to accommodate current operations; 2) building a new, 14,000-square-foot facility to maximize programmatic growth; and 3) leasing and renovating a new satellite office elsewhere in the city, building off of CCL’s current operation of a satellite office in South Chicago. Armed with this information, CCL is now weighing the benefits and challenges associated with each scenario.

“We’re not in a public health crisis anymore, but it does feel like the pandemic again with the uncertainties around federal funding,” says González-Crussi. “By going through the FFA exercise, we have a very tangible idea of what’s needed to be able to execute a project when the timing is right and to make data-informed decisions that will get us to where we want to be in the future.”

Indianapolis: HOPE Community Development Corporation

Dr. TD Robinson founded HOPE Community Development Corporation (HOPE CDC) in 2000 out of the Mt. Paran Baptist Church, of which he is pastor, to help the community access affordable housing. “HOPE is an acronym for Helping Others Pursue Excellence,” Dr. Robinson explains, and the organization does this by offering affordable housing and classes for first-time buyers and those seeking to improve their credit scores, among other examples. In 2013, HOPE CDC and Mt. Paran moved to a 38-acre plot on Indianapolis’ Far East Side to further expand their services through the City of HOPE project, a campus offering affordable housing, a senior living facility, a recreation and community center, and an early childhood education (ECE) facility.

When HOPE CDC joined SNI in September 2021, Dr. Robinson knew that he wanted help planning the City of HOPE’s ECE center and had already invited IFF to join a consortium of local organizations, informed by an analysis of local ECE needs produced by IFF’s Community Data Insights team. The questions, then, were 1) how could the project be financed, and 2) who could be brought in to manage it, since HOPE CDC had no ECE experience.

After several months, HOPE CDC launched the FFA process in summer 2022, seeking to gain insights about the ECE center’s construction and budgeting requirements. Pulling information from other consortium members, IFF’s Real Estate Solutions team in Indiana compiled the center’s anticipated operating costs and revenue needs, as well as several possible scenarios to fund the project. After completing the FFA, IFF continued to provide coaching to support HOPE CDC as the organization approached potential partners to help fund and operate the center. Empowered with budgeting and fundraising information identified during the FFA process, this additional support helped position the organization for a potential partnership with Goodwill Industries of Central Indiana, which HOPE CDC is continuing to explore today.

“Our goal is to see a bustling, robust campus full of activity and the good things that enrich people’s lives and help them pursue excellence,” says Dr. Robinson. “IFF’s team was fabulous to work with, and we still have a great relationship to this day.”

St. Louis: Good Journey Development Foundation

“I wanted to create an organization that would support young people in their efforts toward their personal success, however they defined it,” says Dionne Ferguson, Good Journey Development Foundation’s founder and executive director. “We are the people that we are serving.”

Through programming that includes youth arts classes, life skill-building activities, and a summer leadership academy, Good Journey works to engage and challenge youth in North St. Louis, where Ferguson lives. Just about everyone who works with the organization — artists, gardeners, therapists, scientists, poets — lives in the community, too.

Since founding the organization with a few other community members in 2004, Ferguson has run Good Journey without an office. She uses her home for things like storage and operates programming at partner organizations, such as schools, community centers, and community gardens. Good Journey joined SNI in June 2021, hoping to take the next step in the organization’s evolution.

“The pandemic proved to us what we’re capable of, but it also highlighted what we didn’t have together on the structural side,” says Ferguson. “That included some really key things that an organization needs in order to grow and sustain its programs.”

In addition to learnings through SNI, a FFA set Good Journey on the path to its first dedicated facility. In late 2021, Ferguson and two of Good Journey’s board members connected with IFF’s Real Estate Solutions team in Missouri to discuss facility options, exploring goals, priorities, challenges, and needs.

Through this process it became clear that the organization still needed to answer foundational questions about its long-term vision and strategy before it could proceed with the FFA. So, while participating in the rest of the SNI programming, Ferguson and her board members also embarked on a visioning process to refine its plans – aided by an IFF-created guide.

“We look for an organization’s clear vision for its future programming and an understanding of that programming’s potential relationship to a facility,” says Gabbie Haenn, formerly IFF’s lead project manager, now serving as vice president of special projects. “Programs drive facilities, not the other way around.”

“It was a great and beneficial exercise for our organization to go through,” adds Ferguson, “to answer those questions and determine, ‘This is really what we want.’”

Having clarified key details about the organization’s programming, operations, financial health, and interest in exploring debt as a source of capital, Good Journey began its FFA in May 2022. In October, IFF presented three facility scenarios that Good Journey could pursue: 1) purchasing and renovating a multi-family home next to its community garden; 2) leasing from a church at a reduced rate; or 3) purchasing and renovating a more ideally sized space elsewhere in the organization’s desired Academy neighborhood.

As is often the case with FFAs, Good Journey wasn’t immediately ready to pursue any of the three options, but, by engaging in the visioning and FFA processes, the organization was equipped with a clear idea of what it needed to accomplish to realize its goals. Over the next couple years, Good Journey continued to refine its plans and, for its 20^th anniversary in 2024, it launched a capital campaign that will enable the nonprofit to purchase its first permanent facility.

“From where we left off in 2022, our ideas for a facility were still a dream, but we had a plan that we could operate from,” says Ferguson. “Now, we are in a great position because we have that solid plan.”

Click here to learn more about IFF’s Real Estate Solutions work across the Midwest