Easter Seals Metropolitan Chicago Inc.

EASTER SEALS METROPOLITAN CHICAGO, INC. IS A PRIVATE NON-PROFIT SOCIAL SERVICE AGENCY THAT TRANSFORMS THE LIVES OF EARLY LEARNERS AND INDIVIDUALS OF ALL (SEE SCHEDULE O)

In a world where educational services have become standardized and family services aren’t yet democr

Goal One: Enhance and ensure program quality, informed by the development of program metrics and other approaches to rigorous assessment

Goal Two: Continue to enhance the organizational foundation: a) enhanced financial rigor and accuracy; b) industry-leading talent and human resources; c) innovative IT; d) strategic facilities management

Goal Three: Robustly assess community needs and sustainable programming to explore expansion of services (current or new) to enhance positive impact on clients and expand influence

Easterseals invests in professional learning and credentialing of our valued employees. One example of this is our tuition reimbursement policies or "Grow Your Own." The Grow Your Own program identifies long term substitutes or paraprofessionals in our Easterseals Academy classrooms where we exclusively serve students with disabilities and provides tuition reimbursement and supervised student teaching for those long term substitutes or paraprofessionals to become licensed teachers. This program has successfully certified 8-10 new teachers per year, who then commit to teaching for at least three years at Easterseals.

The organization has gone through a period of dramatic financial and operational turnaround. Three years ago the organizational picture was dire and the Board hired a new CEO. The organization faced financial challenges: there was a serious liquidity issue, the line of credit was maxed; there was substantial debt, significant past due accounts payable, and the organization almost ran out of cash in August of 2019. From May 2019- Dec 2020, through a series of restructuring moves, Easterseals diagnosed the cash liquidity issue, significantly reduced costs, implemented new financial systems, restructured debt; and began the process of paying down debt. By December 2020 the organization was upgraded from “credit risk” to “credit pass” putting the organization back in good standing with the bank. This upgrade followed 12 months of significantly improved financial performance that represented a lot of hard work. It also followed the complete restructuring of all of the debt, and the complete paydown of the line of credit, which was maxed at nearly $3M for almost three years. In addition, Easterseals has undertaken a complete governance review. A group of Board members and the CEO looked at the Committee structure, bylaws, Board membership and issued a set of recommendations that reconstituted the Board Committees and pushed for an ambitious diversification of Board membership to dramatically expand the number and percentage of people of color, women, members with substantive expertise in early childhood and disability as well as people with disabilities. This led to the addition of 14 new Board members during 2021-22—women, men of color, substantive experts and people with disabilities. The Board of Director demographics in May 2019 were nearly 83% men, 17% women; 83% Caucasian, 3% African American, 7% Asian American, 7% Latino. The Board of Director demographics in October 2022: 68% men, 27% women; 65% Caucasian, 20% African American, 8% Asian American, 7% LatinX.