Together, we can create lasting change for Chicago's future. Make your gift today.
Together, we can create lasting change for Chicago's future. Make your gift today.
For nearly 50 years, the mission of the Carole Robertson Center for Learning (the Center) has been to educate, enrich, and empower children and families, with a focus on communities that have suffered from a legacy of disinvestment and marginalization. To accomplish our critical mission, we must ensure that the Center is financially strong and stable over the long term.
As part of our Invest Today, Empower Tomorrow Campaign, the Center aims to raise $2.5 million to establish the Carole Robertson Center for Learning Sustainability Fund. his investment will build our current reserve fund to $10 million, reflecting best practice for organizations at a budget level similar to ours. A step beyond the development of an operating reserve, this fund will be a protected means of revenue designed to grow over time. This is a powerful way to ensure that our organization can be resilient in the face of unexpected challenges and disruption.
With Growth Comes Responsibility
Over the past several years, the Center’s reach and footprint has grown dramatically. Our expansion has enabled the Center to serve more children, families, and communities, and hire many more staff, becoming the largest organization of our kind in the City of Chicago. Now more than ever, we have a responsibility to persist and fulfill the promise we have made to foster the potential in all children and youth.
Children and Youth Served
Our Credibility as a Systems Change Advocate
As a leading and trusted organization in the early learning and youth development fields across the city and state, the Carole Robertson Center is singularly positioned to inform and influence systems change to benefit the communities we serve. The Center is deeply invested in the practice of community-based advocacy, which uplifts the voices of the families we serve as well as our frontline workforce to inform policy conversations and generate solutions to the challenges facing our communities. By bringing this unique perspective to tables with local, state, and national policymakers, the Center functions as a bridge builder between grassroots and grass tops advocacy efforts.
Our Commitment to Innovation and Transformative Impact
To fulfill our mission to educate, enrich, and empower children and families, it is not sufficient solely to deliver high-quality programs. We must improve and innovate to reach the scale of transformative impact. The Center invests deeply in continuous learning and evaluation using a variety of evidence-based tools and qualitative methods to measure child, family, and staff outcomes. As we learn from our own program delivery, we can identify innovative program models with the potential to scale within or even outside of the Center.
