Matchmaking helps the needy
SANDRA GUY sguy@suntimes.com November 18, 2011 6:52PM
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Updated: January 17, 2012 11:55AM
Jennifer Blackwell, the pre-kindergarten supervisor at St. Vincent de Paul Center, realized her decade-long goal of planting a butterfly garden for the center’s children by using a Chicago web service that fulfills non-profits’ wish lists.
“The garden is filled with cool-looking plants that attract butterflies and bees,” said Blackwell, who oversees the center’s programs for needy children ages 3 to 5. “The kids can see what the insects are doing.”
Blackwell’s garden got planted after Barrington landscape company Avant-Gardenscapes (avant-gardenscapes.com) saw the request on Zealous Good (zealousgood.com), a Chicago web-based startup founded by 26-year-old Brittany Martin Graunke of Lincoln Park.
The landscaper donated $400 worth of plants, herbs, ceramic planters and gardening soil, as well as tomato, cucumber, pepper and watermelon plants to start a vegetable garden.
The children at St. Vincent de Paul may now enjoy watering the plants, working in the dirt and grass, and figuring out how and why the plants thrive or struggle, said Blackwell, who credited teacher Suzanne Grissom with leading the garden activities.
Zealous Good matches non-profits’ wish lists with people and companies who want to donate in-kind goods rather than cash.
Non-profits fill out on-line forms detailing their profiles and wish lists. They subscribe to the service for a $15-to-$25 monthly fee, depending on the descriptiveness of their web-profile features.
Donors, who have free website access, likewise submit their information on the website, and the two sets of data are matched according to categories. The non-profits receive an email when a wish looks as though it can be fulfilled, and the two parties arrange the exchanges.
Graunke realized there was a disconnect between non-profits’ needs and in-kind donors when she worked as strategic-engagement manager at the United Way of Metropolitan Chicago.
Zealous Good has created donations as diverse as a flat-screen TV valued at $300 to Friends of the Bessemer Bears, which supports the Bessemer Park Special Olympics team, to a $50 mini-refrigerator donated to the Greenhouse Theater Center.
A second Chicago startup, CommuniTeach (CommuniTeach.com), matches people to build community in a different way. The social enterprise co-founded by Sarah Press, a 25-year-old Wicker Park resident, and Ben Paul, a 25-year-old Northbrook native, lets people who want to learn a skill — anything from playing the guitar to canning tomatoes — find a volunteer teacher.
The company aims to do the same thing in the workforce, and has started a pilot program with Arlington Heights-based Restaurant.com to help its 400 employees share skills.
“Companies spend more than $100 billion each year on corporate training, often by bringing in an outside consultant who stays for a day and leaves. We want to show that employees can benefit by learning from each other and sharing skills,” said Press, who started her first free-learning program while she earned her bachelor’s degree at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She leveraged her studies in political science with a minor in social entrepreneurship to match student tutors with the children of the university’s residence-hall and other non-faculty workers.
The young entrepreneurs blend their idealism with financial savvy.
Graunke, who earned her bachelor’s in industrial engineering and management sciences at Northwestern University and worked as a management consultant at Bain & Company, spent a year “moonlighting” her Zealous Good idea before launching the website. She is financing the venture with her own savings, keeping her costs low and monitoring her progress toward specific goals. Within six months, Zealous Good has matched more than 165 donations worth about $44,000, and helped 30 non-profits.
“I am far ahead of where I thought I would be,” Graunke said. “I think that during the tough economy, people are becoming more lean with what they own and carry. There is a sense that, ‘I don’t want to have to have all of this stuff, but I know that someone could benefit from it because this is such a hard time.’”
Press worked as a management consultant at Bain & Co. and then as program manager at i.c. stars, a Chicago non-profit that teaches young people to become community leaders and skilled technology professionals, before she decided to run CommuniTeach full-time last July.
CommuniTeach has attracted more than 3,000 members in Chicago, Boston and Pittsburgh, its three launch cities, and has raised $25,000 in seed funding. Press aims to raise another $225,000 and expand to new communities through an ambassadors’ outreach program.
“I love what I’m doing, and I think CommuniTeach has the potential to transform how people learn and interact with each other, and at the same time, expand their networks,” Press said.
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