In my work at Cara, partners often express concern that our society’s system of support has failed so many of our neighbors in need. “The system is just broken,” they’ll say. If this is true, perhaps the system is broken because it’s been built to provide services – not community. More…
At Cara we have a professional clothing standard rooted in all of our core values: Motivation, Affirmation, Structure, Community, and Intentionality.
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“At Cara we celebrate all instances of progress, understanding that the journey in the right direction is just as, if not more important than, a final destination.”
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The following remarks were delivered by Cara President and CEO Maria Kim at the 24th annual Chicago Neighborhood Development Awards.
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Corralling 75-ish social entrepreneurs is no small feat. They’re chatty, they’re connectors, and, with the right dose of caffeine, they’re insatiably curious and are always on the hustle for smarter, more creative ways to go after social solutions that stick. More…
I love being in DC. I love the weight of it, the buzz of it, the feeling you get when you stand up against a monument and realize both your smallness and your capacity for greatness all at the same time. More…
Charities are over. Dead. Finished. Instead of a strategy that relies on asking and giving, from here on in, we’re going to be earning our way. Contributions, once seen as donations, are increasingly being replaced by investments with an expected rate of social return. More…
My husband and I joke that the Addison bus stop just outside the Blue Line (a rail on Chicago’s Transit Authority) is perhaps the most civilized queue on the planet. In a world of otherwise rampant commuter chaos, up emerges this entirely self-governed, voluntary, single-file line starting from the bus stop and extending all the way down the sidewalk. More…
Three quarters of a typical nonprofit’s budget is spent on programming, easily making programming its largest cost center. It’s difficult, but a nonprofit operating a social enterprise can change the equation where you have a business that is bottom lining cash to fund the nonprofit and creating training opportunities to participants. More…
