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Social Enterprise

Concordia sees a future where all people have the opportunity to achieve their full potential. So we created Concordia Day and Concordia Place as mission sisters, with interwoven missions:

  • As a Place for All, Concordia Place serves people of all ages – babies, youth, teens, adults, and seniors – and regardless of their economic level.
  • As a social enterprise, Concordia Day transforms the lives beyond the children in its early learning centers each day. 100% of its proceeds go to the high-impact mission and growth of Concordia Place, so those children and families can reach their full potential. This larger social mission resonates with the values of socially conscious families.

And it started by responding to unmet need for child care.

There is a high demand for something Concordia does very well – world class early learning and care for children and families.*

Concordia Place leveraged this core competency, reverse-engineered the typical for-profit social enterprise model (think Newman’s Own or Toms Shoes), and launched Concordia Day early learning centers. Concordia Day not only helps address the child care desert in Chicago, it ensures that children, teens and families from all economic levels have access to growth and opportunity at Concordia Place.

Read more here in this April 2017 Social Innovations Journal article about how Concordia Place challenged itself to create a solution to the “long-term work with short-term funding” conundrum that plagues the missions of most nonprofits.

* A 2016 study by Rasheed Malik and Katie Hamm at the Center for American Progress maps the capacity of licensed child care centers and the populations of children under the age of five.